One Night In Auburn
by Alardem
Summary: Not related to the F.E.A.R. series. The Auburn District is slowly wasting away under Alma's influence, and one particular victim finds himself entangled in a terrifying, nonsensical experience.
1. This is going to be a long night

One night in Auburn

**One night in Auburn...**

The night always seemed to make Frank feel unsettled about his home. There was no real reason to pin it down, but there was just something depressing in it, a feeling that made his soul feel hollow and callous. He was never a superstitious man of course, not by any stretch, but even he had to admit that the sudden, disturbing feeling of pure, vengeful _hate_ would leave him vaguely unsettled.

Auburn was not a great place. It was a small, dumpy ghetto, full of delinquents, rotting buildings and unpleasantness. Ever since he had moved in a shabby, cramped old apartment building five years ago just because he had sunken that low, there was a general feeling of slow, but powerful evil growing in the darkened hearts of those who dared to live in such a hell.

Of course, this night was going to be an exception, for it was the day that the feeling came to a head. Frank had just finished relieving himself in his decaying toilet (he had tried his best to make it look as un-disgusting as possible and failed in that aspect,) when he distinctly heard childish giggling. Now, the only children that could possibly be in the building were those of the Hendersons next door, who were the only friends that a man like Frank could make in his five years of misery ('Friends' in the loosest sense of the word.)

He quickly scanned the room, finally deciding that his paranoia had caused him to imagine it. After all, he had been taking life quite hard, hadn't he? Didn't he almost accidentally fall off the roof last night, although he hadn't been quite sure how it happened as there seemed to be a gap between him opening the door of his room to suddenly finding himself hanging twenty feet above the ground?

He sat down on his bed and tried to harden his resolve. He was going to make his way out of this hellhole, after five years of wallowing in it, and he wasn't going to let hallucinations get in his way. He smiled to himself, when suddenly, the door was being attacked extremely violently, as if a rampaging bull had been trying to force its way in.

He ran up to the door at first, and then realized what a stupid thing it was, when the door suddenly swung opened and there stood little Amanda, looking blankly at him with a very deadly-looking axe about the size of Frank's torso in her hands. There was some scarlet splattered on its head, which he tried vaguely to figure out before he saw the bodies outside.

His heart suddenly seemed to stop completely, and the world swam around in front of him, as Amanda, sweet little Amanda skipped happily along with her bloody axe in her hands. He vaguely heard cold, soulless giggling in his very soul, before he blacked out.

**(Are there any comments you'd like to make about it, or helpful criticism for me? This is pretty much the first time I've actually tried to write a story set in the F.E.A.R storyline, and I was going for a Stephen King approach, although it is quite half-assed in my opinion.)**


	2. Mark Saunders

_Kill!!_

A single, distinctive thought suddenly cut through Frank's clouded consciousness and disturbed him enough to bring him back to life. He opened his eyes, just in time to see the kid raising the axe over his head. She seemed to have no problem with carrying something about twice her size, and in a calmer situation, Frank would have found it hilarious. Of course, this was a rather inconvenient time, and as she swung her axe down towards his head, he suddenly swung his legs up and kicked her right in the stomach.

While Frank had never so much as thrown a punch before, he wasn't going to let himself get beaten so easily, especially not by a little kid. However, Amanda was apparently unfazed by this, not even dropping her axe, and she charged again. Frank got up and ducked just in time for her to drop her weapon and leap on him, suddenly trying to rip his throat out like a savage creature.

**BANG!**

A single gunshot rang through the room and Amanda's head burst like a balloon, spraying blood and brains on Frank's shirt. His heart was beating so fast that it felt like it was constantly vibrating, and fear flowed through him as he realized that he had a headless corpse of a child on him. He pushed it off with a yell, and turned around to see a man standing perfectly still in the doorway, handling a deadly-looking revolver in his hand like a professional.

"W-Who are you?" Frank asked nervously, fearing the way the man was unaffected by the bloodshed almost as much as having a dead child in the room with him.

"I am responsible for making sure that this district is sterilized" the man stated in a calm, well-practiced voice "and I suggest that you follow me if you value your life"

Feeling that he had no other choice with a madman pointing a gun at him, he decided to give up and do whatever came to mind, seeing as any choice he had would inevitably lead to a gruesome end.

"I guess so" he mumbled nervously, and he walked slowly towards the man, trying his best to ignore the gore that covered both Frank and the nasty looking stains on the stranger's shirt. The stranger nodded and walked back into the hall, unaffected by the horror that seemed to encompass the entire building. He felt the sudden urge to leap on the man and beat the life out of him, but the image of a dead child on him suddenly deflated him. What could possibly have made someone so innocent into a savage monster?

Once Frank stepped out after the man, he immediately felt sickened at the senseless violence that had occurred in this place. It appeared to him that these people had been mutilated by wolves, but the disturbing thing was that they had done this to each other, and each face seemed to be fixed in the same, agonized grimace of pure hate.  
Some had their bodies literally torn open, exposing their savaged guts, while others were missing limbs, heads and one particular person seemed to have been skinned alive.

"It's a shame, really." growled the stranger "there never seems to be any pattern or reason to this." He paused by one of the bodies, took what appeared to be some brain matter, and placed it in one of the many pockets in the man's jacket.

"What are you talking about? You mean this sort of thing's happened before?"

The man turned around, exposing his dark, scarred face, and grinned widely

"People kill each other all the time. It's a fact. We all have this urge to maim, to destroy and kill, but being human, we try to suppress it. You've heard of Serial Killer X, right?"

Frank nodded slowly, remembering the last few months where the entire city had been caught up in a wave of murders, each more depraved than the last, before suddenly culminating in the capture of a young man who had apparently gone around and preyed on the predators. It was also a time of extreme anxiety and unpleasantness, and almost everyday it would be reported that people would break out into sudden, incurable bouts of insanity and brutally attack each other with no apparent reason.

"Yes. Do you mean that this sort of thing is happening again?"

"Not just again. We have reason to believe that this is the source of madness in the city, and my job is to exterminate the insane and evacuate any survivors. So far as I can tell, you're the first sane person I've seen in three hours."

The man sighed, and then added, in a calmer voice,

"My name is Mark Saunders, and I am part of the Special Crimes Unit."

"Um, Frank."

Feeling at a loss of words to say, Frank simply walked on with Mark, who seemed to be very calm and well-assured, as if he had done this before (then again, he probably had dealt with this before, a thought that Frank found highly disturbing.) After descending the ancient, rotting stairs, they were met with nothing. Frank let out an audible sigh, but Mark bristled slightly, and started stalking slowly across the lobby.

Despite the carnage that had been wrought above their heads, there was absolutely nothing that seemed out of place. The corridors were empty and quiet; the cool night air wafted through a slightly ajar door, and the little that Frank could see looked entirely ordinary. He braced himself, knowing that this couldn't be right.

Mark stuck a cautious hand out on the door, and pushed it open slowly, aiming his gun at whatever lay ahead. Again, there was nothing that Frank could find unusual, other than the fact that there was absolutely no sign of life anywhere, as if they had simply vanished. The remains of what could have been a car lay on the other side of the street, but it was too rusted and burnt out to be of any use to Frank. Then again, it had been like this since he had been here, and when he had asked the late superintendent of Frank's building, one of the few sane people who Frank knew, he had sadly moaned that no one cared and then locked himself in his room. He took his own life the next day.

Mark walked around the corner, and beckoned for Frank to follow him. Cautiously, Frank stepped out, being painfully aware of how exposed he was. He looked around, and was horrified to find that Mark was nowhere in sight. He considered calling out for him, but realized that doing that would probably attract some unpleasant figures, and he wasn't prepared to fight his way out. He would have to make himself scarce and think things through.

**(Now that I look back on this, this story was originally going to be a rather painfully written 28-days later homage, where the people of the district became hateful and crazy thanks to the influence of the district. Of course, I decided to add in some irrelevant eldritch occult stuff to this story, which even confuses the hell out of me, and I'm not sure that I may be able to tie this into the F.E.A.R. story pretty well.)**


	3. Reality Shift

He put his back to the wall, concealing himself in the shadows and tried to map out what little he knew about his home to make an escape route. While Auburn was a tiny little scab in comparison to the rest of the city, it would still take at least an hour to cover its distance on foot. Of course, that was assuming that he would be able to simply walk out.

The apartment building that Frank had lived in was only a couple of blocks away from a massive wall that Frank assumed had been built to wall off the unsightly hell from the upper-class _royalty_ that comprised the rest of the town. That wall was his ticket to freedom, however messed up that freedom was.

Nodding for some strange reason, Frank slowly inched his way across the wall of the building, making sure that he was well within the cover of the darkness. A curious thing happened. The more he moved away from the building's entrance, the further away the corner of the building appeared to him. Frank couldn't stand this nonsense for another minute, and let go of the wall. Immediately, his surroundings seemed to darken and change, as if it were starting to fall apart.

All the lights except for a lone street-light next to Frank suddenly died out, plunging the world into a nightmarish darkness. The buildings around him seemed to wither away and age, their walls covered with all sorts of filth, rust and long-dried blood. The pavement seemed to have been replaced with a sort of slimy looking tar that squelched as he moved around and felt extremely unpleasant.

Frank was suddenly overcome with a sensation of pins and needles and fell to his knees, his body screaming with pain. It felt like each nerve of his body had been torn apart by a chainsaw, and filled with extremely agonizing venom, then having his body being consumed by a pack of enraged wolves. He tried to scream his lungs out, but it felt like control of himself was no longer possible. At the same time, a cold, inhuman moan filled his ears, hypnotizing him with it's monstrous sounding, yet soothing tone.

A figure seemed to be moving towards him quickly, and it was carrying something heavy. Frank could barely see through a red haze that seemed to fog up his sight, but there was something very familiar about the stranger. As it walked within the light, Frank could clearly see something very, very wrong about him. It was walking with a slight awkwardness in its step, as if it wasn't sure it wanted to do it, but what concerned Frank was its appearance. The clothes, the face, the hair, even the small scar down one side of his forehead, were Frank's.

The imposter stalked over to where Frank was knelt down, raised a very sturdy lead pipe, and brought it down on Frank's head. Despite all the pain that Frank had been feeling at the moment, his head felt like it had exploded, and Frank drifted into an even darker world.

Frank was being eaten alive. At least, that's what he currently felt like, the way his entire body seemed to feel both debilitatingly numb and unbearably tormented. It seemed as if he was being encased, buried alive in the middle of a churning, living cocoon on a wall, as he could see great tendrils of vividly red flesh snaking around the similarly disturbing looking chamber he had appeared in, as well as thousands of identical looking cocoons decorating the wall around him. He had never seen anything like this in his life, and he was truly scared. It actually felt like he was inside a beast, the way the whole room was trembling and moving around, and he could actually hear a slow, hungry pant as if the room was alive and suffering from lung cancer.

He seemed to suffer in this state for what felt like an eternity, perhaps several centillions of eternity, his sense of time being warped to be absolutely useless. He was unable to think of anything, as the pain increased infinitely so, and his body, wasted and broken, only seemed to be running on the will of the monster that was tormenting him. His body had become shifted into a featureless blob, devoid of limbs, mouths, visible ears and pretty much everything except for his two eyes, which were eternally wide open and made him unable to escape his horror. He had no mouth, and he must scream.

A long, long, long, long time seemed to pass, Frank had lost all sense of being and memory, and the 'furniture' of the horrific chamber he was in began to shrivel and lose its color. Pleadingly, he looked around for whatever was causing the change, and was rewarded by the appearance of a chalk-white, faceless, insanely tall man gliding over to him, carrying a long, deadly looking scepter on his side. Despite the pain he was in, and how much he ached for the sweet release of death to take him, the apparition distressed him immensely and he was horrified that whatever evil had tormented him had made him unable to escape or communicate.

The tall man simply stared at Frank for the briefest of seconds, and after an unfathomable amount of time and torture, Frank was free from pain. He was free from everything, free from this world, free to return back to the world of man.

He woke up; feeling absolutely shattered from that insane dream, and found himself locked in yet another prison, this time in a tiny bathroom. The whole area seemed to be thousands of times older than what he would previously had thought of, and for a mad moment, he feared that he had fallen asleep and woke up millions of years later. That explained the general feel of rot and decay, although not the strong sense of hate, dried blood, and what looked like torn up bones scattered all over the floor. The mirror had shattered ages ago, and the bath-tub was covered in blackish stuff that Frank was too afraid to look at.

He attempted to push the door open, and when it was absolutely unyielding to his request, he banged and screamed on the door, cursing it and breaking his body apart. Finally, drained of hope and energy, he lay down on the floor, hoping that if he was going to die in this horrific nightmare, he hoped it would be quick.

Frank lay face down on the absolutely filthy floor, feeling his head go faint and nauseous from the utter stench of rot and decay. He put his head up and stared at the door, his only hope of escape from this particular nightmare, and he watched it as a hawk would mark a rat, figuring out possible ways to approach his escape route. He had tried pleading to the door, which obviously didn't work, he had tried to search for any lock or hidden catch on the door, coming empty handed, he angrily swore at the door, which was still infuriatingly immobile, and finally came up with attempting to make as much noise as he possibly could, not caring if he was attracting an army of psychotic killers, as long as he would finally be released from his prison.

He then cupped his ear to the door, hoping to hear the footsteps of a potential rescuer, and was rewarded with complete silence. There was no sign of life, or even the possibility of anything outside the bathroom. Sighing with defeat, Frank nearly stepped on a small envelope that had suddenly appeared under the door. He had no idea how it had got there, as the 'door' looked like it was actually part of the wall that had been dolled up to add some variety, and the walls were so tight that even sub-sub-sub-sub atomic particles had no chance of slipping out. He reeled in shock at that bizarre thought.

The envelope itself was spotlessly clean and uncreased, an absolute contrast to Frank's abominable surroundings. As he picked it up, he noted just how thin and unreal it felt, as if it didn't belong in here. He slowly opened it up, and was surprised to find a small note attached.

_Frank,  
If you are reading this note, then you have also seen this area change into a twisted perversion of its actual state. I believe that we are actually in another world, a dimension parallel to our real world. My team is not exactly sure of the cause, or why it is limited to this certain area, but I am currently researching it._

Your job however, is to escape this world and meet up with me in the dining room. I believe that extreme fear and stress are 'triggers' for transformation in this area. All you need to do is to take the specialized pills enclosed in this envelope, and you will immediately see a change in your surroundings.

Ps. I don't think it'd be wise to leave at the moment, they've got the whole area under lockdown.

Mark Saunders 

As comforting as the note should have been, Frank instead felt a deep feeling of dread and confusion, as dozens of questions sprung up for each cryptic answer. He looked inside the envelope, disconcerted at how large roomy it actually was despite its almost two-dimensional appearance, and found a rather large jar filled to the hilt with tiny, chalk-white pills. Not finding any labels on it, he opened it carefully, surprised at just how air-tight the jars were kept, and finally took one and swallowed it without water. He blinked, and realized that the bathroom had changed.

It was still squalid, filthy and rusted, but he could recognize it as a typical, unhygienic bathroom one would find in a restaurant with Auburn standards. There were only one or two dark stains on the floor, appearing to be the mark of some very careless visitors, and the door was now a light-brown shade and almost-clean, with a huge brass doorknob to boot. He tried the knob, and was immensely relieved to feel it move.

His mood faded however, as he saw the rest of his surroundings. He had stepped out into a diner, but the windows had been hastily boarded up along with the door, the few tables in the room were flipped over as a sort of cover, and the bar featured a man lying on it with a knife in his skull.

"Stop right there!" barked a voice from behind the bar, and Mark slowly rose from the shadows, his gun raised as if he was about to blow Frank's brains out. He stalked towards Frank, stopped, squinted at him, and abruptly lowered his revolver, allowing Frank to let out a relieved sigh.  
"I see you've managed to come back, Frank. I'm not sure why it's happening, but we need to keep our heads and stick together."

At that moment, the windows started shaking violently, and the boards strained as they tried to hold back whatever was trying to get inside. Mark whispered at Frank

"Frank, have you ever used a gun before?"  
"N-No..."  
"Do you think you can try?"  
"Uhhhh.."

Mark quickly grabbed the gun that had been hung on the wall as a sort of mantelpiece and threw it into Frank's hands. Frank stared at it as if it had crawled up his leg, and Mark's words did nothing to help him.

"It's a sawn-off double-barreled shotgun. I don't have any extra rounds, so only use this as a last-resort."


	4. Terry's Notes

_In the beginning, there was chaos  
A colossal, incomprehensible void  
Out of the darkness came the many  
Countless numbers of unimaginable intelligences and power  
In their immeasurably long toil, they sought to create life itself  
And they succeeded_

Almost....   
-The book of the true king, Volume I

_Gods? No  
Demons? Worse  
Aliens? Perhaps  
What are they?  
Death, Pain, Hate- Are they real?  
Cults-Are they really that stupid?_ -The notes of Terrence Somerset

**August 24 2024**  
There was a bizarre feeling gnawing on the back of my mind, something oddly familiar, and I could barely recall, indeed understand what it was. It felt, sort of, _good_. This was obviously an untraditional usage of the word good, of course, as I was currently in the middle of a ritual rather unpleasant to describe, and even more so to understand. My name is Terrence Somerset, and I believe in the occult. I am not part of a new-age Scien-whatever bollocks, nor am I connected to those bizarre devil-worship groups. I believe in something else. At least, up until three weeks ago, I had. I am fervent in these beliefs, because I am a living example of one of them.

I am not human.

This is the reason why I am currently running for my life. This is the reason why I am being hunted down like an animal. This is the reason why I am currently living my life minute-to-minute in the shadows, waking from one nightmare only to find myself deeper in another one.

Why?

I officially came into this world a year ago, as the offspring of Dr. Somerset and Madame Somerset. My 'father' was a once-respected scientist, who had been incredibly rich and had enjoyed a high-paying job in Armacham Technology Corporation. My mother made a living as a paranormal agent, exorcising unruly spirits, fighting demons and generally bizarre stuff not of this world. Both of them also enjoyed pain, death, hate and were part of a cult that worshipped a living embodiment of these feelings. They believed that only these agonies can cure us from our other-wise useless lives and they awaited the day when their true 'king' would return and 'purify' us all.

I myself am no stranger to death. I am not ashamed to admit that I have killed, and that I have killed to a great degree. I feel great remorse for this, but I must move on and continue to find answers. The horrific revelation that has forced me to be on the run, is directly involved with my death, or to be more accurate, deaths.

I was put together with human body-parts and artificial nano-cells, and reanimated using both the immense power of science that my father possessed, and demonic artifacts and magick possessed from my mother. They believe that in order to summon the gods, they must create an unnatural creature, of both the magical, demonic world, and the normal, scientific world. Unfortunately in order to do so, they must require the agonized souls of said creations, and they want a lot. I have realized that I am the latest incarnation of this poor, pathetic creature, and in order for the world to be plunged into darkness, I must be destroyed. I cannot allow that to happen

_Is life becoming a struggle? Need a helping hand? Want to be in with the rest of us?  
Join __**Neology**__ today! For only 50 $ a month, we'll help guide you to purification and true happiness!! (October 1st 2008, Soul monthly)_

**August 25 2024**

_  
_Disgusting, isn't it? It shows just how stupid we truly are. **Neology**, or whatever name they've come up with since then, is just a painfully obvious and creepy front for the true cult of pain and death. By popularizing their religion and gaining financial support and zealous followers, the Cult of Death/Pain/Lsoy'x#*)!)lsmzn/Cthulhu's plans have developed one step further.

This bull is really quite popular, and already half of the people in this wretched town, including the mayor himself, have confessed to be part of this conspiracy. I need to understand how this works out, if I want to put an end to this horrific charade_  
_

_._-Terrence Somerset


	5. The Good Doctor

Dark. So dark. What is this place? It's covered in blood and rust. The wall. Our home? It hurts so much. Please, my king, save me! I pledge my mind, body and soul to

What the hell am I writing? Have they returned? No, no, no. Think! Now, where am I? A wall! No, it only looks like a wall, think! Is this the gateway? I'm a dead man. No! I can't think that way! The cult still lives, and they must face up to the horrors they have created.

A horrific feeling of foreboding grips us all. We have lived on a placid, miniscule island of ignorance and reality, and it is time for the infinite waves of chaos to take us all. 

-_Terrence Somerset._

**It's not an easy thing, raising the dead. Even when you're among the top five most intelligent men on the planet and have enough power to buy a small continent, playing god would raise a lot of interesting and absurd problems. First off, when you're in a profession that requires perfect, unquestionable logic, accepting nothing abnormal or unforeseen, your knowledge of existence will be frowned upon, or in extreme cases, get you shot through the lungs. Even when we are but an invisible speck on the tiniest particle of life in the prodigious masses of the universe, our insignificant and frail minds could not possibly comprehend the horrible truth, of the true scale of Life, the Universe and Everything. Reality is but an illusion, created for the insignificant to live out their futile lives.**

The reason why I consider myself to be intelligent is because I know the truth of our world. Our world, the reality that we can normally perceive, is merely one among countless other realms, patrolled by inconceivable intelligences and governed by physics too absurd for the average man to understand. Yet, there is one world parallel to ours, full of fantastic creatures and beautiful works of the supernatural, but governed by the most despicable of things, one that feasts on the pain and suffering of others, and delights in creating the most depraved tortures for them. And the worst part is that while most of the worlds could care less for others, this monster understands, and desires our world for its own benefit.

I know this, for I have been raised in a society that adamantly believes in the coming of this abominable beast, for they believe that only through pain and suffering could life be truly appreciated. However, there lies a deeper story, one of fear and desperation, for even the most sadistic and twisted man could not stand an eternal existence of pure agony and suffering. The cult had been twisted from its original purpose as a way to eliminate this ultimate threat, altered irreversibly by generations of hopeless pariahs and doom-Sayers to a society of freaks who cause miser throughout the world in the misguided hope of redeeming themselves in the monster's eyes.

Though all the infinite worlds had once been part of the great mixture, in the literally inconceivable and immense past, they had been separated and cut off from each other by what appeared to be a petty disagreement by the very powers that had formed existence. Battered and drifting helplessly through the seas of chaos, the worlds randomly brushed by and mixed, forming the very 'reality' that humans are familiar with. However, as our world was one which was berefit of magic, that was so full of reality and sanity, it was mostly protected from the dangerous elements of the outside, although it was possible to break this barrier. And on certain days, where the barrier was at its weakest, the elements of magick would burst through, flooding our world with inconceivably horrific things and unspeakable atrocities.

Of course, while it takes a very open mind to fully comprehend what I have witnessed, I am firm in my belief that there is a way to save our world, to prevent any more breaches from happening. And that is to create a key, one that would be born in both the Realm of Science and the Realm of Magick, a key that would prevent the world of magick from crossing over while it exists. But I must be patient, for it is not yet time for the world to cross over. No, not yet.

_August 24th 2019_

**the project's been started, thankfully. This secret must only be kept with me and Diana; I cannot trust anyone else to understand what we are trying to do. My experiments with reanimating, or basically putting new life into deceased bodies, have left me rather unpopular with the local public.**

My own company, as unscrupulous as they are, forced me to resign and practically wiped out every trace of me from their records. I am essentially invisible, and I prefer to keep it that way. I have managed to retain most of the data from the long years of tireless working, hoping desperately to create something resembling life in a destroyed body.

If I succeed, the world would be a far different place from what it is now, possibly better, possibly worse. It could be used to save the lives of those who need it, or certain individuals may be resurrected by this fascinating power, those who may not deserve to live. But this is not the true reason why I am doing this.

It is almost impossible; certainly we are unable to return life to those who have already lost it in our Reality. But with the power of the Ethereal Realms, death becomes a mere inconvenience, a simple problem with a simple remedy. And Diana, a wonderful woman who has personal experience, and genuine understanding with the paranormal, knows how to counter such a difficult problem.

As I said before, the Realm of Science, or the 'Reality' that we live in, is merely a small speck of normality in the vast seas of the universe. An inperceivable shield of absolutely incomprehensive size (I believe it to be at least five times as large as the universe itself) makes it extremely difficult for anything but the strongest, purest magic to manifest for a meaningful period.

But, occasionally, our Realm may collide with other worlds in the void, resulting in a breach in the shield that allows more diluted forms of magic to escape into our world. This results in fantastic stories of impossible beasts, people with inhuman powers, and places that are saturated with magic. Diana Keller (or Somerset) is an exception, having been on the receiving end of one of these 'breaches' on the moment of her birth.

While she does not manifest any immediately apparent powers, she has the unfortunate ability to absorb _**any**_** thought or emotion from any living thing for hundreds of miles. This obviously is quite a jarring thing to experience, and while she might have had a chance to start a career as a psychologist, in 2010 she was examined by a Government Unit specializing in paranormal activities codenamed FEAR and became an official agent at the tender age of fifteen.**

Despite her rather introverted, misanthropic, cynical, jaded and almost abrasive personality, she was surprisingly well-adjusted considering the strange things she experienced. In addition to experiencing powerful emotions, she complained of insomnia and often she experienced disturbing 'hallucinations', which were soon discovered to be proof of her connection to the otherworld.

Intrigued by this discovery, the agency scoured through thousands of files on psychics and strange phenomenon reported around the country, making it a point to keep an open mind despite the fact that 99.99% of these reports were usually false or misunderstood acts of nature. However, the case of Diana's family was a disturbing one.

In order to find out the cause of her unusual experiences, they were shocked to find that almost her entire family, save a few distant cousins, had ritualistically murdered each other after the disappearance of Diana. At first, this was believed to be a case of grief, but several documents, along with a few bizarre artifacts indicated something different.

The Kellers were a small, ancient clan, rife with inbreeding and full of fearful racists stemming back for thousands of years. Literally thousands of generations ago, they had adopted a new bizarre religion, worshipping a group of obscure and frightening deities. They were believed to possess unnatural powers, and they soon gained thousands of fearful supporters from all over the world, hoping that they would be spared from the wrath of the inbred clan.

Disturbed by the proof of a paganistic secret cult, the Agency filed away the documents and combed through the country, horrified to find that supporters of this insane cult had taken their place in the government, with almost absolute power at their disposal. After infiltrating and kidnapping a rather corrupt senator, the operation being described in the news as a 'holiday', they were disturbed to find that the beliefs were true.

Now, having grown up in a family group that supports these beliefs, I personally find that almost no one actually understands what is true or not, but I am certain that most of the core beliefs stem from fact. There are strange, inhuman beings that cannot even begin to comprehend the concept of our world, but believing that becoming their loyal minions will even gain their attention is utterly foolish and misguided. I also know that there exists a myriad of artifacts around the world, almost all of them too dangerous and strange to even think of.

As I said, after a rather lengthy interrogation, the senator divulged the location of a cult safe-hose, warning the agents that they are lucky they cannot understand. Alerting the authorities, an enormous police raid comprising of dozens of SWAT teams, a few attack helicopters, and even a battalion of Military Police was sent to a five-storey apartment building in the Auburn District. The building was full of squatters and homeless people, who inexplicably went into a murderous rage and attacked the soldiers.

Of the 5,000 emergency workers who were called into the area, only a few hundred returned relatively intact. Although around a few dozen people were lost from direct attacks by the crazed inhabitants, it was reported that the atmosphere of the district was causing others to go irreversibly insane and fall into a catatonic state.

Disturbed, the FEAR agents found that the source of the insanity were a pile of monstrous artifacts, all of whom exuded unimaginable 'things' and freaked people out. It is now believed that the mayhem of this incident may have been caused by a 'reality-shift' in the area, the artifacts being the result of the shift.

A few hardy individuals, braving the sickening influence of the district and the murderous inhabitants of the area, managed to extract dozens of these artifacts for further study and attempted to destroy the rest. However, the artifacts were too dangerous to move around for very long, and any attempt to harm them would prove disastrous for whoever was trying to destroy it.

**Eventually, after sealing off the area, managing to extricate the artifacts and a few survivors, the district was considered a dead-zone and quarantined for an undesignated time. It is too dangerous to consider destroying the area, as it may unintentionally release the anomalies in the area, and the damage would inevitably spread to the rest of the city. Even now, it is reported that people are falling ill and experiencing strange hallucinations in the city, and some have even appeared to have gone mad.**

The artifacts now lie in the vaults of the FEAR agency, where they are carefully examined to determine their usefulness. Although most of them were malicious in design and appeared to absolutely alien in purpose and appearance, there were a few that appeared to have been created by a benign intelligence. For one thing, a certain artifact that resembled a cross between a plant and a giant bacterium would regurgitate dozens of tiny little tablets.

Once taken, these tablets proved to be extremely effective in terms of energizing the user and snapping them out of hallucinations. At least, Diana managed to get some rest once she had some. Although no apparent side-effects were noticed at the time, it was later discovered that it merely replaced the users perception of the world with another one, with varying unpleasant results. These pills, called 'Abel' for some reason, were distributed to agents as well as law-enforcement agencies, in order to counter the insanity that was currently gripping the city.

As well as the artifacts, invaluable information on the cult as well as a few living members helped FEAR to understand the situation. They are a masochistic cult of lunatics and madmen, believing in a group of deities reigning over the negative aspects of existence such as death and pain, believing that these aspects help to balance and purify the world. They perform rituals that are often too depraved and insane for a sane man to consider, but it is believed that the ritual that birthed Diana was merely an attempt among thousands of other failed ones.

In order to bridge the worlds of the Ethereal and the Scientific, one would need a creature that would exist simultaneously in either of them. Since they had almost no idea or power, they had to rely on their insane beliefs and attempted to attribute power to their rituals. What I am trying to say that in believing that they were trying to summon a creature of magic (which would usually be impossible), they were actually successful in creating a hybrid.

At least, this magic manifested itself in a human child who was born during one of these rituals. Sadly enough, their bizarre beliefs dictated that those who carried out such an act must destroy each other in order to purify themselves, and they followed the orders to the letter.

Diana resigned a few years ago. After the Auburn incident, she went on a journey to discover more of the cult, and found dozens of bizarre results of their rituals. She faced fearsome monsters, impossible anomalies, and found it too tiring to pursue. She eventually published a book that was part auto-biographical and part fiction on the experiences she faced and what she deduced on the paranormal world.

She doesn't really mean for people to take it seriously, but she clearly wants to prove that there are things beyond the understanding of an ordinary person, and she unintentionally covered up the existence of FEAR. There are now several movies and dozens of half-baked spin-offs of her work, all of them deriving her fantastic accounts of the FEAR team for their own stories. Thankfully, the FEAR agency has a sense of humor, and finds that her fantastic stories help to fictionalize the existence of an actual paranormal organization.  


**I met her last year. I can trust her to keep my secret, and she truly believes that what we are doing is the right thing. She has experienced first-hand the chaos from the influence of this terrible creature might be like, and she wants to make sure that no more lives are destroyed from it**

**  
Personally, I know that doing something as absurd as creating a magical being would almost certainly end in disaster, but I believe that I have to try. If I manage to create someone who would act as a buffer to prevent the summoning of this monster in our life time, as small as that chance may be, I will take it. At least, we will have a son to take care of**

_-Dr. Malcolm Somerset._


	6. Walking Death

_For countless years, the powers toiled and sweated  
And their efforts were not for naught.  
For life had been created, the greatest gift of all  
But there was a single flaw,  
Evil.  
For every soul and life that existed, there was an opposite  
Life and Death. Love & Evil.  
And the king of death smiled on the infinite worlds upon him  
as their blessed agonies and sorrow filled his heart with joy  
and he vowed to continue to do so. _-The book of the true king Chapter 2

August 30th 2024

_Dark. So dark. What is this place? It's covered in blood and rust. The wall. Our home? It hurts so much. Please, my king, save me! I pledge my mind, body and soul to_

What the hell am I writing? Have they returned? No, no, no. Think! Now, where am I? A wall! No, it only looks like a wall, think! Is this the gateway? I'm a dead man. No! I can't think that way! The cult still lives, and they must face up to the horrors they have created.

A horrific feeling of foreboding grips us all. We have lived on a placid, miniscule island of ignorance and reality, and it is time for the infinite waves of chaos to take us all. –**Terrence Somerset.**

Frank hated the weapon that had been forced into his hands, as he always thought that guns were heavy and unpleasant, but nonetheless he held it tightly and took cover behind the bar, trying to conceal his unpleasantly exposed head. The desperate bangs and scratches from outside seemed to focus onto a single area directly behind Frank, and he assumed it to be the front door. He heard the sound of something long and heavy being dragged across the floor, and assumed that his mysterious ally was trying to barricade the entrance with a shelf.

He felt strangely detached to this, as if he was simply experiencing a very immersive horror movie, although this experience was the most disturbing and realistic thing he had ever seen. The sound of dozens of people desperately trying to break inside reminded him of the films he loved to see, where stupid zombies would wander around feasting on the marginally less intelligent living. Hell, he had even tried writing a few cheap novels about it, although no matter how hard he tried, he never managed to break free of the dreaded cliches or made it actually quite interesting.

He slowly breathed in and out, trying to channel the same calm, collected attitude that his heroes and heroines always had, but simply succeeded in making him even less enthusiastic about moving from his cover. The sounds were intensifying and getting as loud and obnoxious as a front-yard concert, and he could have sworn that he heard a window smash. He saw pale grey light peeking through the door, and knew that it wouldn't last for much longer. He couldn't hear Mark, and assumed that he was either hiding or had run off without telling him.

Finally, after endless minutes of tormented waiting, as Frank tried frantically to keep as quiet and still as possible, he heard the floorboards creak unpleasantly loud as what sounded like a band of strangers sneak in nervously. He could have sworn that he heard someone wince at the loud noise blowing their cover, and the sound of nervous shivering and quiet, shallow breaths echoed almost silently through the stale air of the abandoned building. Apparently, whoever had broke inside wasn't sure if there were people inside, and despite himself, he slowly got up without the gun and did his best to take a look at the intruders without bringing attention to himself. He had to cover his mouth when he actually saw what they looked like.

They sure didn't look normal, as their eyes were glazed and blankly staring out at the darkness, and they were standing quite awkwardly, as if they couldn't control themselves well. Their breathing seemed quite artificial and forced, as if they were merely doing it for the sake of it, seeing as a few of them had gaping, copiously bleeding holes in their chest, and a few looked as if they shouldn't have possibly been walking around under normal circumstances. The horrific wounds that the poor wretches exhibited ranged from small, almost invisible bloody holes in their pale skin, to missing limbs, gouged eyes, exposed rib-cages, and other disturbing injuries. He had the horrible feeling that all of them were dead.

They sure didn't seem to notice him, not at first, but they were clearly looking around for someone. They walked out slowly and awkwardly, often bumping into things or stumbling in the dark, yet still managing to look menacing and dangerous. Now he knew why zombies could be considered scary. Making sure to keep a healthy distance away, Frank slowly edged backwards, twitching nervously and fearing that he would bump into a hideous apparition or a deathly-pale corpse if he turned around. He always hated the dark, but now, having to be immersed in almost-complete darkness, hearing the shuffling and faint whispering of the corpses, gave him a new definition of fear. If he lived through this, he'd have some very inspiring material for a novel.

Frank was not happy, to make a huge understatement. His once-bright career of writing horror novels had spiralled down into a never-ending cycle of dreary, bleak existence in a place that resembled hell itself. His pathetic existence had gone even worse when it suddenly turned out that people he knew, hell, people he actually _liked,_ had gone insane and killed anyone they could get their hands on, including themselves.

But now, having suffered a disturbingly vivid vision (no, he swore that whatever had happened to him was absolutely real, why else was it so convincing?) and found himself in an old, abandoned shack, surrounded by the stumbling, slow reanimated corpses of the dead, he began to simply not care. After all, as terrible as this catastrophe was, it was a great motivator for him, and he was determined to escape this hellhole or die trying.

The corpses had now fanned out and left enough space for Frank to make a bee-line for it, but he feared that any sudden movements would alert the walking dead to his presence. He shuffled slowly towards the door, trying to avoid making eye contact with a particularly putrid corpse, and was within arms-reach of the doorway when an unfamiliar voice barked at him.

"Please, Run! Save yourself!!"

As much as he hated it, he turned around and found himself staring at the glassy eyes of a rather deathly pale young man. His head was unnaturally twisted, almost as if his neck had liquefied, and Frank guessed that the poor wretch had twisted his own neck.

"You have to help us. I can't stop it! You have to end our misery!" slurred the corpse, his jaws moving awkwardly and unfamiliarly. He sure seemed quite reluctant, as his body slowly stumbled towards Frank, looking as if his body was doing the opposite of what his mind wanted. As horrific as the thought of being forced to experience un-death was, there was no way Frank would ever bring himself to end a life, even a twisted perversion of one.

He ran away into the light, noticing strangely that a strange mist had appeared all over the place, making it almost impossible for Frank to see in front of him. Soon, he had lost all sense of direction and realised that he had stupidly trapped himself. The mist was unusual, in that it was thick and wispy, yet Frank could barely feel anything except for a deathly chill. He shivered and wrapped his coat tightly around himself, and slowly walked forward, hoping to find stumble on something, anything. He felt strangely at ease, as if he were reading one of his own dirt-cheap novels, and enjoyed this sense of detachment.

Frank trudged weakly on, his mind dulled and deadened by the infuriating onslaught of the elements. The mysterious, inexplicable mists had slowly given away to a full-on flurry of furious winds and biting cold. A blizzard of freezing white poured down all around, engulfing him in a chilling feeling of fear and futility. The only thing that encompassed his vision was pure, blinding white.

And then he fell into nothing. A primal, shrill scream forced itself out of Frank's body, filling the air with an incoherent, yet piercingly loud noise. The strange sound of what could only be described as the sound of the last, desperate gasp of a strangled man reached his ears, somehow arranging itself in a tune that almost made it seem like laughter. He drifted down in the endless seas of infinity, lost from the abstract grasp of time and space itself. His destiny would not meet him in this world.

He smashed down into what could have been a floor, feeling every nerve of his body writhe and explode with agonizing pain. His chest felt excruciatingly restricted, as if he was being smothered, but he couldn't summon enough strength to even scream. His mouth instead twisted itself into ungodly positions, expressing the unbearable agony he was feeling. The world felt so alien, so unreal, that he was unsure that he was even feeling it. He wondered vaguely, amongst an onslaught of depraved thoughts and insane degrees of pain, if he had died, and welcomed the release that would surely come.

No such release appeared yet. He writhed around like a dying snake, his limbs numb and useless. His actual body, or the little his frail mind could perceive of himself, did not appear to have any damage externally, and he concluded that whatever he was feeling was only in his mind. Darkness engulfed him, 'shifting' from ungodly shades of whom no sane man had ever seen before to hues that caused disgust and agony at a mere glance.

His body was yanked upwards, and Frank quivered in fear as his body hovered above the ground, swinging slowly and twitching his head painfully in a manner that would have suggested in a safer place that he was having a nightmare. But this 'hallucination' was too strong, and too horrific to have been constructed by his mind. As much as he would have loved to cling on to the delusion of control, his mind knew that he was completely out of control of the horror he was facing.

And he was now facing the tall man, the chalk-white, immaculately robed specter that had appeared to him during his torment in the 'beast.' Despite the maddened wave of questions and insults Frank desperately wanted to address to the monster, he was absolutely silent and the pale specter reciprocated. His cane rose up to Frank's face, exposing a cruelly carved and chiseled point on the end, covered in dried, decaying blood. It was clear that the stranger did not mean well.

Frank writhed uselessly in the grasp of his unseen tormentors, while the tall, face-less man raised his staff and ran him through. A wave of agony unlike anything Frank ever felt before poured into every pore of his body, filling every atom with excruciating pain and terror. He had become one with pain. This painful agony lasted for what could have been eternity, or perhaps an instant, but surely far too long for any sane man to bear.

His body finally gave up, and he released all control of himself, hoping that there would be an end to the pain. The tall man had disappeared, but had left in his place a pale, blank looking man, who was dressed in what he assumed to be his own clothes. Frank struggled painfully, but his body had been formed into the same blob that he had experienced before, and he couldn't do a thing except watch.

The body walked calmly and arrogantly to what barely remained of Frank, and touched him. He felt like his body was being torn asunder into vigincentighoullions of tiny shreds, and he was powerless to stop it. Soon, every physical piece of him had been obliterated, but he was still tormented with the fact that he could see everything that was happening.

The tall-man now tore his way out of the pitiful corpse's chest, leaving it in a crumpled, bloody heap in the floor. Strangely enough, although he had no possible means of moving, it felt like Frank's soul was gravitating to his broken shell. After a while, Frank could once again feel the pain increase a trillion-fold, but he could at least move himself around. He felt around in his pocket, finally coming up with a pile of white things in his hand.

_Deus Ex Machina pills. Just what I need._

He swallowed them, and was consumed into darkness


	7. Murdering A Monster

He was being pulled and pushed in every direction, his very soul being ground up and abused in unbearable ways. He had gone beyond the point of resisting or screaming, and merely let himself float through this nothingness. His mind was too weak, too fragile to form any coherent thoughts beyond a feeling of absolute terror and the knowledge that his senses were being bombarded with an overwhelming barrage of things beyond a man's understanding.

Voices not of his own floated through his mind, and visions seemed to dance in front of him. A tall figure, inhuman yet still a person, being stretched and dragged into a pitch black void by a tendril of putrid flesh. Millions of desecrated bodies, disfigured and mutilated beyond recognition in an ocean of blood, surrounded by a vast, inconceivable vat of flesh. A woman, standing tall and running a broken knife through an enormous eye unlike any animal he had ever seen. And he saw himself, standing above the broken and bloodied body of the tall-man, pinning him to the the ground with that horrible scythe.

He opened his eyes, and found Mark waving a match over his face. He cringed, and turned his head, unable to stand the brightness or the fact that he had once again returned to the land of the living. He moaned weakly, and his body lay limply on the floor.

"Easy, Frank. You've just had another vision, and it's going to blow your mind at first. Just relax and stay calm. We've reached the blockade already, and we're about to leave the district."

Frank looked weakly around, and was once again overwhelmed by the assault on his senses. An entire army of police officers and heavily armed military soldiers were gathered around, taking up defensive positions and setting up what looked like a checkpoint. A few weary people were being tended to, wide-eyed and frightened. His heart leapt with joy, but his tongue was dry and flopped around in his mouth like a dying seal, but he managed to find the strength to respond to the suspicious officer.

"What is happening to us?"

"This district is undergoing a reality shift, Frank, and it's causing anyone within the district limits to experience delusions, horrific visions and become incurably insane. My team has been equipped with pills that counter this effect, but unfortunately, they merely replace one delusion with something worse."

"I'm really sorry about this Frank, but I'll have to leave you and continue on through the district and find more survivors. You're one of the lucky ones, my friend."

He felt dead. At least he could think well enough to process his senses, but he felt absolutely drained, and he could not feel his heart pumping. He had gone through depraved tortures that even the most twisted of sadists could not withstand, yet he had then been regurgitated by some unimaginable force back to the world of the living.

Why? It was pretty clear that whatever he felt was real, although not in the traditional sense. The glimpses he witnessed, the sheer absurdity and wonder of that otherworld, all was enough to convince him that he had somehow been whisked into another dimension. The sheer idea was absurd, it went against every law of logic and infuriated his mind, yet it was so convincing, so vivid, that he knew that it existed.

_So there is a hell. I feel like an idiot for laughing at those TV nut jobs now. They may be crazy, they may have absolutely no proof of their beliefs, but at least they had the right idea._

He choked a little as he recalled the long weekends when he and the Hendersons, the only family that actually owned a tv (black-and-white, yes, and also quite grainy) would come together for "TV Hours", where they would liven up their dreary existence by mocking the vapid, brainless sheeple (he liked that word, actually. Dan told him that) droning on and on about the most soul-destroying stuff one could imagine.

He remembered how Dan, the young, bright-eyed man, a man whose constant optimism gave a good contrast to Frank's cynicism. He remembered Amanda and Bill (Oh god, Amanda, you're DEAD!! You're dead because a madman splattered your brains all over my face!!) as they giggled at their father's strange sayings and 'uncle' Frank's constant jokes.

He closed his eyes, feeling tears wash seep through his eyes, and he let them flow. His old life, the life of writing ghost stories for people who cared, the life of visiting dear old Mom, the life where he actually meant something, was gone. Destroyed. Yet, despite all his efforts to repair it, despite finding happiness in the worst of places and getting a true friend out of the deal, some messed up little freak in the sky decided to play the world's un-funniest practical joke on him. Seeing everyone he knew dead, seeing his home destroyed, having his mind torn to pieces for fun, being kept in the dark about everything. He couldn't take it anymore.

He opened his eyes. A woman, probably in her early thirties, was observing him with deep concern written all over her face. Her eyes were a piercing pale blue, and he let himself stare at her flawless, beautiful face, feeling that he deserved a rest. Her dark-blonde hair fell slightly past her shoulders, although she had managed to die it back into a ponytail beforehand. He assumed that she was a colleague of Mark, although she was dressed more casually than the uniform than the madman had been. She wore a black jacket over a red shirt and pleasingly tight jeans.

He wondered why he was being so observant. Was he that shocked by seeing a woman?  
He also wondered why his mind was drifting off into thinking nonsense and spouting non-sequitors. He wondered why they were called non-sequitors anyway, what kind of language was that from.

"He's a lost cause, Bob. His mind's been irreversibly corrupted by the district. " The woman. Rather soft, yet quite firm and clear. She knew what she was doing.

"Damnit, I'm not going to lose another one. Miriam, give him an overdose!" The panicked voice of a young police officer, probably still in his teens.

_Damn, how old are they hiring nowadays?_

Frank also didn't like the sound of 'losing another one.' He could see the headline. 54 PEOPLE FOUND DEAD IN AUBURN DISTRICT. POSSIBLE TERRORISM. although it would probably be placed in a 6-inch box at the bottom of the paper.

"Bob, you and I both know full well what the side effects of taking Abel could lead to! We have to keep him stimulated enough for his pulse to restart!"

"Miriam, there's a tiny, tiny chance that he could make it through! Yes, listen to me, I know it sounds crazy, the chances are probably one in a trillion trillion, but listen! He might enter a cardiac arrest and appear dead for the briefest fraction of a second, but there's just the slightest possibility of his body coming back to life!"

"..How would you know all that, Bob? I'm not risking a man's life just to prove your theories"

As the two people bickered over taking charge of him, Frank could feel himself once again slipping away. He was being recalled into the otherworld, and he knew that he would be in for a world of pain. Literally.

Frank floated through the void yet again, his mind wandering to countless places. He reflected back on his life, on the choices he could have made. He thought of Mary, of their first kiss, of the smell of her hair, of the sound of her voice. He thought of his father, of his kind eyes, of his loud laughs, of him always working. He thought of his mother, young, happy, beautiful. And he knew that the young, happy faces of the ones he loved were now gone, lost in the void of time. He would only see those people he loved in his lonely mind.

He thought of his career, of the endless hours he toiled on working on his stories, of how he wanted to brighten people's lives with his own wry observations, of his strange imaginings, of his true thoughts. And then came the death of his father, the loser of a long struggle with his heart. He remembered his mother crying as he looked on, their father's grave a cheap and unfitting tribute to the best man Frank had ever known. His stories stopped, as their lack of funds was finally noticed and their home was repossessed.

He was forced to rent an apartment room in the cheapest place in the city, his mother sent to a drab, soulless retiring home, spending her last years without the love of her son. That was five years ago. What did he accomplish in those five years? He wallowed in his pity, preferring to hate his life rather than change it.

Now, when his life was in danger, when everyone he knew was gone, he began to change. He was a determined man, set on his goal of overcoming the odds and making it. He had suffered enough in his life, and he wasn't going to let anyone take advantage of him. Not even a freakish eldritch abomination. He focused angrily, trying to arrange his thoughts together, setting his mind on making it through this mess. It was time to end it.

He slammed down yet again into a fleshy, slimy floor. He opened his eyes, and was met with an overwhelmingly red mass of moving muscle. It pulsed constantly; squelching out droplets of crimson and making him feel disgusted. He looked around angrily, and was met with an unexpected sight. A swarm of tentacles had burst out from a vast pit in the body of the beast, squirming around and slapping the floor. A myriad of pale, alien eyes, as large as a man's head, were spread out randomly on the tentacles, looking as if they had been pasted on roughly. They sickly blinked and stared blindly at Frank.

He was starting to regret his arrogance.

Confidence. Boldness. Resolution. All those words that described fearlessness.

Like so many good things, they were fleeting. He had once again returned to that horrific otherworld, a 'place' so painful, so unusual, that mere words could not describe it. It felt as if it was literally shifting, making him feel nauseous. There was no air, no atmosphere for him to possibly breathe, yet despite the mugginess and the pain in his lungs as they lay still, he was still alive.

He could still think properly (well, perhaps not too well), and he at least felt like he wasn't being torn apart. The world he had been drawn into was covered with ugly discolored flesh, which appeared to have been stretched and rotted out. In fact, it looked as if the 'skin' had actually been taken from the hides of numerous unthinkable monsters, as it was literally crawling with disgusting and un-angled shapes. A mass of slimy tendrils swarmed around the place, filling Frank with a deep sense of disgust. The whole place followed no laws of human architecture, yet it seemed to follow a distinct pattern of logic. Distinctly Alien Logic.

All of those thoughts became irrelevant, as the figure of Frank's constant tormentor returned. His heart stopped, and his thoughts became rushed and panicked. Every encounter with this mysterious figure had ended with Frank holding the short end of the stick, and yet it was clear that he was being kept alive. This monster could have easily ended Frank's life with a simple motion, yet he hadn't. Oh, he had attacked Frank, he could remember that horrible torture, yet his death could have come at any time.

Perhaps he was being kept for further torment, but this monster was clearly taking care not to destroy him. He obviously contained immense power, and he probably could have taken on an army, let alone a tormented, frightened, broken and defenseless man. Yet, something was holding him back, almost as if he had been ordered to do so. By what? What horrific influence could possibly be controlling this demon? Was he a servant, or a prisoner?

There was complete silence for what felt like hours, and then a flood of overwhelming sounds washed over Frank's ears. He would have fell down to his knees, screaming his head off, but he was too frightened, too paralyzed to even react. He could hear the skin pulsing, throbbing, and almost breathing. He could hear incoherent chanting, whispers that seemed to emanate from the Tall Man, yet his foe was curiously silent. It felt for all the world like there was an ungodly aura emanating from the demon, consuming all around the darkened soul and warping them.

The Tall Man loomed over him, yet it didn't try to get any closer to Frank. He was unsure of where exactly the monster was, as it seemed to be both right next to him, and as far away as the moon. It hurt so much. A long scepter, covered with substances that were too disgusting and unpleasant for Frank to willingly recognize, materialized in the Demon's left hand, yet the monster didn't seem to have been affected at all by carrying something so enormous.

Then, the apparition simply faded away, leaving behind only the incredibly long, and extremely deadly looking weapon in its place. The painful sounds, the headaches that accompanied the freakish demon were gone, replaced by guttural growls and nasty snarls. Frank hesitantly turned around, and almost screamed.

There were two _things_ in there, two unnatural monsters that could only have spawned from a depraved imagination. Namely, Frank's. A small comfort, at least for Frank's frail mind, was that they were humanoid, although the resemblance ended there.

Where there should have been skin, there was only torn flesh and pouring veins. Where there should have been a head, there was a pulsing tumor that beat disturbingly fast. There were heads, of course, two deformed, rather soft looking protrusions from the 'chest' of the creatures. The smaller looking of these heads flopped around bonelessly, only being connected to the body by flimsy strands of tissue. They stooped forward, their misshapen arms stretching down to the floor and their legs were pulsing with muscles and tumors. They seemed to be a twisted perversion of primates, or perhaps, people.

The larger of the pair let out an unearthly shriek, and began to charge at the poor man. Frank had been paralyzed in terror up until this point, but the scream sprung him into action. He knew that he would be torn apart and devoured by these abominations, no matter what the Tall Man would have done, and he had to find a way to protect himself. He grabbed the scepter, grunting as the weight of the weapon nearly knocked him down and finally managed to lift it up in time to strike the charging Gum-head.

Both man and beast fell over, Frank terrified and yet determined to keep his cool. He desperately tried to get up, and found that the other Gum-head had begun to circle him, waiting for a chance to attack an unexposed area. Frank raised the weapon determinately, not willing to allow these things to touch him. These were monsters, not people, not animals, not anything of this world. They were filled with pure hate, fueled by rage and anger, and they could not be considered living things. Therefore, Frank made an exception for these things.

He let out a yell and leapt onto the farther Gum-head, taking it by surprise and he swung his scepter at its head. Surprisingly enough, instead of slicing the monster, it simply collided with a sickening crack and he felt like he was using a blunt weapon. He blinked, and was rather shocked to find that the scepter had changed its appearance to a black, spiked mace, rather medieval looking and strangely comforting in its familiarity in Frank's mind.

He raised the bludgeon above his head; his face contorted in anger and frustration, and put all of his strength into bringing down the weapon onto the monster. He smashed the thing, feeling salty blood splatter onto his face and he was goaded by it. He could feel the head of the monster becoming soft and pulpy, and he strangely liked it.

Bloodthirsty thoughts of anger and pain ran through Frank's mind, laughing at him as he was encouraged by the pain and suffering of this monster. He was no longer aware that he was in the middle of a freakish battle, or that he was even trying to kill a monster. He now only knew that he enjoyed the screams and sweet sounds of pain that came from him smashing the floor. He hit the monster again. And again. And again. He smashed it until it became pulpy and squishy, he smashed it until there was nothing left to hit, and he kept doing it. He stopped, and opened his eyes.

He was back in the Auburn District again, and he had committed a horrible act. He was hunched over a mutilated and bloodied body of a policeman, which had been smashed apart way beyond the point of being recognizable. He, Frank the Loser, had killed a man, and he had enjoyed it too. He was absolutely stunned by this, and he could no longer think.

He definitely was insane now. He couldn't ever justify what he had done. He had hallucinated that this man, this ordinary unlucky human being, was a monster, and he had relished destroying it. He crouched over the pulpy remains of the body, and his mind was going into overdrive. He had gone against his own morals, he had taken the life of an innocent being, and he had actually enjoyed it too.

There was no one around, as if every sign of life save for him had simply vanished. He simply sat there, silent and thoughtless, staring at the corpse and he began to cry. Not loud, racking sobs, but he trembled with silent tears, as he was overcome by his experiences and defeated by them. He had been tormented beyond the breaking point, and he had been brought to the point of snuffing out, cutting short a person's life.

He let out a scream to the heavens, begging them to leave him alone, and to end his torment. He had been wronged and agonized in numerous ways, yet he now felt that his judgement was deserved. He prayed for something to make him pay for his unforgivable crime, for a chance at redemption, but nothing came.

There was dead silence.

He had curled up into a ball, gently rocking himself back and forth, constantly replaying that horrible atrocity that he had committed with his own hands. He had somehow deluded himself into the utterly absurd, absolutely ridiculous assumption that this man, this completely ordinary young man, had been a despicable monster, a non-entity worthy of destruction, much like Frank himself. Frank had never felt so low-down in his life as he did now.

His mind was absolutely terrified, fearful of his sanity, fearful for his very life. How long had this insanity affected Frank? Where those things, that Tall Man, that crazy child Amanda, those corpses, were all of those simply hallucinations? He doubted it, but it still didn't change the fact that he was an insane man in an insane world. He let out a grim chuckle at that, and then realized that there was no one to really care, and he laughed horribly, a hollow, weak rasping cough that echoed among the empty walls.

Oh, those walls. Awareness had somehow returned to Frank. He didn't know, and didn't care, for it had been extremely subtle about itself. He definitely felt like he had been crouched in a fetal position for hours, and for all he knew, he probably had. The streets were dark and forbidding, and their familiarity did nothing to comfort Frank. The few working lights were spread oddly around, vigilantly shining blinding brightness into the world. There was no sign of people, indeed, no evidence that people had even lived here for decades, except for the few strange memories buzzing around that dead-zone called Frank's mind. It was as if the whole world had simply abandoned him

All of this registered as periphery, of course. His body was on standby, and his mind had turned inward, trying its best to hide from itself. That was, of course, impossible. The conscious mind was the focal point of one's identity. It cannot hide from itself, for there was nowhere it could not be. Hell (hell indeed), he could try, but in the end, it would wind up with him in a worse situation, and with another innocent caught up in this catastrophe.

He wondered vaguely, if this was to be his fate, to be eternally condemned to a hellish purgatory, forced to suffer countless unthinkable fates, for his soul to be tormented and put through the wringer in every impossible sense, for him to merely stand a bystander as human lives were smothered, destroyed, snuffed out at his own hands. He wondered if there had been any reason for his torment, or if he were simply an unlucky cosmic plaything.

What could possibly have made him, a middle-aged pulp writer living in a run-down apartment building in probably the most wretched place in the city, deserving of such a fate? He had horrible days, obviously, and there were times where he wanted nothing more than to destroy everything, but he had simply chalked it up to the boredom and tediousness of unemployment. He had never considered seriously injuring, let alone ending the life of another human being, having seen how it brought about pain and misery to even the lucky ones, and simply because he thought of it an unthinkable, yet inevitable condemnation.

He had disfigured this man, robbed him of a face, voided his soul, and destroyed his memories. What was his name? Even the killer, the man who had ended his life, did not bother to know who his victim was. The man had been born out of love and brought up in a loving family; he would have grown up bringing joy to his mother and father. He would cry endlessly for well-deserved attention, he had uttered his first faint word, he would have gone to school, he had made good friends, he had grown taller than his mother, he would have fallen in love, he had left school, he would have found a new job, and he would have repaid that love to his family.

But where had their son gone, the parents would desperately ask? They would wait anxiously in their house, staying up for their child to come back to reassure them, until they would have got a phone call by the friend. Their beloved son had been killed, murdered by an insane, self-loathing degenerate and his mangled body left for the vermin to feast on. And they would never even see his face one last time, for even this small comfort had been destroyed.

He sighed heavily and then realized that he had to move on. The man's life had been snuffed out, yes, and he would never experience the wonders of life ever again, but what was done was done, and it couldn't be taken back. He had already gone insane; he might as well go and enjoy himself in the land of crazies. That was just as well, as he managed to scan the wretched crime one last time, only to be rewarded with a small, hastily written note with what appeared to be a flyer with a strange symbol attached to it.

Perfect. That was just what he needed to confirm his one-way ticket to the Crazy Palace. Had this whole business with the body been a sick trick played by his mind, or had the victim succumbed to the madness of that otherworld? His mind was swirling, but he held onto the latter as he would the edge of a cliff, dangling dangerously over a world of vagueness and uncertainty. He snatched up the note greedily, his weak mind trying desperately to recall the concept of language, and he examined the marks on the paper.

_Frank, it wasn't your fault. None of this is. You have been selected among hundreds to be a play-toy of this strange otherworld, and that poor schmuck was unlucky enough to come across you. Don't be afraid, Frank, but you must realize that not everything you see is real, and you must learn to accept the absurdity around you._

From what I can see, the district is only a deserted, empty place in one dimension. In the Real World, it is still functioning normally, save for anyone who happens to be in your immediate area. Then, there is this strange, dream-like purgatory, a crossroad between Reality and Hell, and you are unfortunately stuck in this. However, the third stage, is a corrupted perversion of the area, full of pain and death, for it is the realm of the Prince, and you must be wary.

Follow the footsteps, Frank, they'll lead you to where you need to be. We will meet again

Mark Saunders

He sat there, processing the information vaguely, and couldn't get his head around it. This District, despite the insane monsters and horrible visions he had experienced, was still functioning normally. People were still living out their miserable lives up there, blissful (hopefully) and ignorant of the suffering happening in their very homes. He was indeed trapped in a purgatory, fitting for befuddled and exhausted man to endlessly wander, forever suffering.

He scanned the streets, having to squint harshly to seriously discern shapes and colors. There was a trail of small dark stains that led on into the darkness, where ghastly shapes sprung from the darkest corners of his imagination, waiting to do unimaginable (or unconceivable, or even unpronounceable) acts of violence and depravity to him. Yet, he numbly went on, knowing that he was too far gone to seriously understand what was happening to himself.

He stumbled weakly after the trail, following it for ages until finally it ended down into a gaping maw of darkness. He always had a fear of holes, having fallen in one when he was seven and having to contend with the darkness and claustrophobia for days. God, the mere idea of it was terrifying him, and he knew that there was something nasty waiting down there. But, what the hell, he'd eventually wind up starving and dying alone if he wandered the streets, and he might as well confront his fears before he died.


	8. Kxt'hlpvmabyi'ek

_The reign of our beloved king has been for eternity  
since time was a young child, since death had been alive  
since destiny itself had not followed it's fate_

But the Realm of Science threatened to come closer, as  
a child of the realm had stepped forward. His power was  
great, and his knowledge was nigh-omniscent, and  
He was the Arrogant Man.

"Almighty King, our world is dark and unenlightened, and her children  
are hungry and desperate. I beseech you to cross over the land for us  
to know the name of the king. I have power beyond any living man's  
imagination, and I know how to take you."

_The king was truly amused at the valor of the man from the land of technology,_  
_For though his wisdom was great, and his power advanced,_  
_it was but a mere atom among the limitless potential of the King's and the King said:_

_"O Arrogant Man, your foolishness and valor are to be commended, _  
_but I shall not submit myself, for firstly, my power is greater than yours and not of your command._  
_Secondly, though I may be all-powerful, the Island of Technology is impossible to reach,_  
_for the borders of chaos are a dark and treacherous ocean nothing, even I cannot will away."_

_"But for you, mere child, for all the bigness of your head, _  
_you may yet be spared of the rigors of the dark ocean._  
_I shall rescue you from the darkness in the Land of Technology,_  
_for you shall live in my household, and there you will learn _  
_humility."_

_And as the king said it, so was it so, and the Arrogant Man crossed_  
_the ocean to the house of the king, where he was brought to his majesty, who said_

_"Now you must repay me for the slight your arrogance has caused me,_  
_for despite your insult I love you as I love every Man and Beast, and you must learn_  
_to take this love into your heart."_

_And so it was done, and the Arrogant Man truly knew the name of the king. For countless centuries, he toiled under the loving care of the king, and through his love_  
_he became known as the Prince._

_The Trial of the Arrogant Man_

_(Editor's note: This story is actually a heavily edited, extremely diluted version of a tale which has undergone innumerous changes and storytellers, all of whom have changed the story to suit their purposes. This Editor has tried her best to piece together the few legible fragments of the tale, and believes that this is probably the truest edition of the story.) - Diana Keller, author of __**Eldritch Tales and Unconentional Mythology**_

**September 14th 2024******

I've been running relentlessly for days now, almost losing track of time altogether. By my estimates of the amount of days have passed, it has been at least a full week since I have taken refuge in the Forests surrounding the city. I had taken this detour in a weak attempt to evade the pursuits of the cult, but I believe this is the wrong choice.

I have already run out of food and water, but I still hold onto this diary. It is my only friend; it is the reason why I continue my existence, for I need to be able to write down my experiences for others to read. There may never be another human soul who will ever lay eyes on these notes, but the simple action of writing them down gives me hope.

Thankfully, starving and ragged, I managed to stumble upon a relatively large, two-storey cabin. It is abandoned, thankfully, but I managed to stumble on a few cans of unpleasantly rotten meat and ravenously devoured them. I will take whatever I can get

**September 15th 2024******

I cannot get out. All the windows have been boarded up, locked up and barred from anyone from escaping. As for the door, it refuses to open in any way. Disturbingly enough, I have found large, heavy chains bound across it, which I had not seen the previous day. Have they caught me already?

This house is disturbingly bare. All the furniture in the house that I have currently seen include five rotting wooden chairs, an altar-like bed, a rather rickety looking table that appears to have been chewed up, and a shelf that was packed with sickeningly rancid, maggoty meat. In addition, I have the strange, ominous feeling of the walls humming, although the sound stops whenever I pay attention.

It feels like I've been drugged with some cheap dope. Is this place haunted? I don't know. The door appears to have crooked left, which is impossible. No, it looks as if it is crooked left and right AT THE SAME TIME? How can this be possible in our world? I am truly afraid now. The windows are too darkened for any light to enter, and my sense of time has been impaired.

**September 16th 2024******

There is someone else in this house. I glimpsed a tall, faceless man gliding up the rotten stairs, but despite my best efforts, there is no physical trace of him. My head hurts. I can definitely hear whispering now. The air is stale and still, and every sound, every ancient creak is amplified in this emptiness. I have the dreaded notion that I may not get out of this house alive. How could I have been so stupid?

**September 17th 2024******

Who is the tall man? I have seen yet another glimpse of that elusive demon, yet I still have no idea of his purpose, of his intentions, even of his existence. He clearly must be real in some form, as I seem to vaguely recognize him, even though my clouded memory plans to deceive me and plant false beliefs in my mind.

Who were my mother and father? No, I have never had a real mother or father, since I am not a natural creation, but I can remember a man and a woman. I can't tell if it was a nice memory, but I remember that they were smiling, as they talked to me, cared for me, and were always there for me when I needed it.

My 'parents' clearly must have bothered to teach me, as I know quite enough to write legibly, although talking is still out of the question really, since I don't have any clear memories of talking to anyone. I'm not even sure I can speak, as my vocal chords had been rather haphazardly connected during my birth, and never quite adjusted rather well

What do I know? Think. The first clear memory I have, where I was fully aware of what was happening, I was alone, sickly, and surrounded by strangers. I remember a thin, pleasant looking woman leaning over, and whispering lovingly into my ear about my parents. She told me that my mother and father, powerful upstanding figures of society, had raised me to be their loyal servant, and that it was essential for my life to be lain down to please their king.

Being that I was already quite capable of understanding exactly what she was talking about, I weakly swiped her, which nonetheless managed to break the ribs in her chest. I remember them laughing at her shrieks of pain, and of a crowd slowly growing around the fallen woman, her screams of mercy getting louder and louder.

Oh no. What happened? Who were my mother and father? Their family name was Somerset, and I clearly got my name from them. I don't doubt that my father was a scientist, or at the very least, a highly intelligent and knowledgeable man. I don't doubt that my mother was a very spiritual woman. But now that I think of it, those tales, those stories of my parent's evil, they become false and contradictory.

I can't really recall any proper memories of my parents, but the general feeling was a very strange thing. It was love. My parents, despite their association to this despicable organization of psychos and freaks, were an exception, for they loved their child and clearly didn't want to have anything to do with them. I just can't remember what happened to them.

**September 18th 2024******

I am clearly beginning to go mad from this isolation. It's not that I'm still trapped in this unconventional dungeon, but the fact that even this hell is preferable to....whatever is out there. It is horrible. I had managed to knock down the door after a few tormenting hours, but the vision I was rewarded it was beyond mere words. Mere language, thoughts or anything can describe what I saw.

It was obviously not in this world, that was for sure. I saw fantastical creatures roaming across a vast sea of non-reality. They literally shimmered, and I had the feeling that they were both there, and yet as far away from me as another planet. It, it felt like I was watching the idea of life in unimaginable ways, yet it was all happening so quickly.

On Earth, as amazing as fantastic as life is already, most of them follow basic patterns. Most animals have a configuration of 2 or so eyes, 4 or more limbs, a head, a mouth and a digestive tract. Countless numbers of these unbelievable monstrosities did possess these traits, but in a strange manner.

Perhaps the brain was placed in the center of the body, the eyes and mouth spread out on the limbs for convenience. Perhaps the limbs would shimmer and change shape without warning, being a swishy tentacle one moment and becoming a clawed arm capable of manipulating objects in the next moment.

Often though, these things would defy most of our own Reality's rules on logic and life, and quite a few would even break the logic of their own rules, perhaps belonging to an even stranger dimension. The intelligence of these things horrified me the most though. Although this house, somehow 'floating' across a void of unreality, managed to keep me safe from the influence of these countless other worlds, it is quite clear that this house originates from a strange world beyond the stretches of this void.

For the most part, the monsters were apathetic and ignorant, thankfully. But I have seen ungodly things that have the power to destroy entire universes without even conceiving of it, being more content to lie around and have petty conflicts with one another. But some, however, don't follow any of our human thinking or at least their motives cannot be understood by people. At the very least, even I have no idea what is going on

It is unbelievably arrogant and ignorant to believe that these deities, powerful as they are, would have anything to do with anything we could possibly conceive of. They are far too powerful, far too dangerous to be concerned with that. These are true Alien Forces, sentient embodiments of chaos, and an unfortunately necessary part of our universe.

However, there are quite a few monsters, that while not being true deities, still possess unimaginable power and have an interest in life, or more specifically people. Even now, I can feel vigincentenillions of invisible things repeating the same phrase all around. It is far too indecipherable or incoherent for me to understand or discern a name from it, and even trying to reproduce a corrupted version (it is far too strange to be a sound) is almost impossible with our vocal chords.

I have no idea what to do. I know that as soon as this prison reaches its insane destination that I will somehow meet up with this horrific intelligence. In honesty, I have quite a lot of questions to ask it.

**September 30th 2024 (????)******

It hurts so much to even think. I can feel his influence homing in on me, tormenting me, and waiting for the right moment to strike and distort my very body into a parody of life, a mere puppet, just like him. I have no idea how long time has passed, this infernal prison makes it impossible to accomplish such a task, not to mention that this void of chaos is far above the forces of my world to be bound by petty rules.

He locked me up in this prison, his own home, and used me as a toy....I'm certain that it's retribution for my desperate escape attempts. I was foolish to believe that I could win against such a powerful, zealous cult, when they have the power of an actual, monstrous near-deity on their side.

My skin is turning an unnatural colour, impossible to describe with words, so out there that I could only call it "color" by analogy. Not to mention, it feels as if indescribable legions of invisible monstrous beings are constantly tearing at me, drawing blood but never wounding. Bits of my body are slowly hardening and falling off, numbly and slowly. I am literally falling to pieces.

My eyes are turning blind, and it is a pity that the last sight I will have will be of this horrible dungeon. I am about to die, and my soul will be lost forever, trapped in an eternal purgatory. But is it so bad, when the alternative would have been to lay eyes on the most awful abomination beyond the imaginations of any living being, right before I am trapped in an infinity of agony and pain??

Before I finally give in to this torment, I must write down what my captor had shown me, for the horrible truth of our experiences to be recorded for someone to see, if not understand.

He was never a human, yet he was not of the Realm of the Ethereal either. He had been driven out of his distant world millennia ago for horrible, unspeakable crimes, and he had roamed the cosmos for billions of years, searching, toiling to redeem himself. At last, he came across a young planet, one which was full of fascinating and impossible things that could not possibly have existed (to him).

He took refuge in this world, assuming a form that was vaguely similar to the primitive ape-like beings that roamed throughout the world, and yet was uncomfortably distant enough to repulse any that could gaze upon his visage. The ape-like beings grew and developed under his subtle and clinical experiments, yet they feared and despised him, as he possessed power beyond the most depraved of their imaginings, and although he appeared supreme, he was not a kind and benevolent power.

Yet, his foolishness and arrogance would be his downfall. There was no fathomable reason that even he could remember, yet I suspect that he simply wanted to satisfy his twisted sense of humor. As he had come from a race far superior and advanced to ours, he was aware of the weird and wonderful things of the Ethereal Realm, and he had communed with the fantastical creatures that roamed the place. Yet, there was one creature that was supreme, whom all the other creatures hated and despised. It was a pain elemental, a total monster that fed on the suffering and agony of life, and it was the largest of them all.

Believing there to be a kindred spirit, the Tall Man arrogantly attempted a summoning ritual, and surprisingly, he succeeded. He had formed a bridge between the Realm of Science and the Realm of Magick, and bound the demon by it's true, unpronouncable name "Kxt'hlpvmabyi'ek". Kxt'hlpvmabyi'ek was rudely awakened by this breach, and although a creature of such magic could not possibly survive in a world where magic is impossible, it knew a good morsel when it saw one. Within a nothingth of an instant of opening the portal, it had closed fully again, and it was the Realm of Science that had been plundered from.

The Tall Man wasn't killed of course, Kxt'hlpvmabyi'ek could only feed on the pain of those who were still alive, but nonetheless, he underwent changes that made death seem merciful. He suffered through impossible, depraved tortures beyond any of his own imaginings, every drop of his agony bloating the twisted maw of the Pain Elemental, and his soul had been completely twisted and corrupted. After endless eternities of torment, he was broken, and became the mindless avatar of the demon, exacting it's will, while not being able to ever control its own actions. He was a prisoner in his own body, and he will remain like this for the rest of all time. I pity him.

That horrible fate makes it clear what I must do. I cannot possibly live on much longer in the influence of this wretched place, and I do not want to be used as another minion of this pure evil. While I am in the void of chaos, the Demon will be left with nothing, and I hope that he will not be happy. I am saddened to say farewell, my diary, for I will launch myself into the empty void and float for eternity, beyond the point of return or redemption. Anything better than to exist as a tormented puppet, a mindless tool of a terrible evil.

**On second thought, I might bring you along with me, my diary. Eternity's a pretty long time, and I need something to do….**

-Terrence Somerset (July 4th 2023-September 30th 2024)


	9. Urban Decay

_Excerpt from "A guide to the otherworld" by Diana Keller_

_**1. Concepts  
1-1: Power of the Mind**___

Life. Mundane, Ordinary, Real. Or is it? How can we be so sure of what is real or not, when all we have to rely on are our five senses and a fragile mind to comprehend it all? Our perception of the world is easy to fool, and we are often too accepting of what we immediately see. Our 'Reality' is merely our own perception of it, and ours alone.

It is considered that every sentient thought and emotion contain a certain amount of force, something that could be described as 'Psychic Energy'. As with our physical differences, these corporeal properties vary for each individual, affecting their amount of energy. The stronger a thought or emotion is, the greater it's psychoenergetic potential. To make things short, this energy allows the feeling to affect the world around the person, along with certain people. The products of one's psychic activities are not merely limited to their inner self, but can also have outside effects.

As mentioned before, the strength of the emotion or thought relies on the psychic potential of the being, along with the power of the thought itself. It is generally believed that negative emotions, being more common and effective, contain more power than a more positive, beneficial emotion.

In some cases, it is observed that certain psychics act as a living sponge for these emotions, receiving every negative thought around them, amplifying it and generally causing anguish for the subject. The likelihood of such a person is extremely rare, and optimistic estimates suggest perhaps a dozen of these psychics exist among us.

It is suggested that young girls may have the highest psychoenergetic potential

The hole, if it even could be called a hole, made Frank feel sick, as he stared at the monstrously carven portal that appeared to move in a way that upset all the rules of matter and perspective. There clearly had been an eldritch malevolence at work, with demonaic shapes and symbols scattered around the circumference, appearing to have been carved, no, melted, with a precision that far exceeded anything humankind would ever achieve. The sheer blackness made it look liquid, yet he knew that there was nothing there but emptiness and death that would come to consume him, to rip apart his mind, body and soul and slowly feast on his agony.

_This is a HOLE. What things lurk in HOLES, Frank? Come on, you should know, you fell in one, didn't you? Didn't you??_

There was something poking in the back of his mind, a feeble voice telling him how crazy everything was, and just how idiotic he was. He could roam the empty district for eternity, doomed to be tormented as he ran and screamed and cried like a lunatic one-man parade, before the last shreds of his sanity ripped apart and he would collapse on the floor, a gibbering shell, drooling on the floor and shivering until his heart gave out or he wasted away. Or he could alternatively fall down a bottomless hole

That was impossible, of course. No matter how deep any hole was, it always had a bottom, and even if this was a horrible, insane world, he was certain that this would not be an exception. He had the wonderful thought of striking the debris at the bottom, shattering his vertebrae, and lying there immobile, unable to move anything. If he was lucky, he'd die of shock. If he wasn't, well, perhaps he'd be the meal of whatever horrific freak was lying at the bottom. If he was truly unlucky, and this was the worst possibility, nothing would happen, and he would survive the fall alone, left to dehydrate, suffocate, starve, or kill himself unmolested. Whoopee!

He moved over to the edge of reason, to the mouth of madness, and peered over into the endless dark and asked himself. Under normal circumstances, he'd be asking some really serious questions about himself. If circumstances were normal, he wouldn't even consider the insane action of leaping blindly into a bottomless hole. But Circumstances were far from normal now. He had gone past that boundary long ago.

So, before his rationality could object and stop himself, he closed his eyes and dropped face-first, uncaring of whatever would happen. Within the tiniest fraction of the smallest instant, he was consumed in complete, utter, absolutely pure darkness, and he was going deeper. He was falling down forever, going faster and faster, and there seemed to be no end in it. Just deeper and deeper, down and down, forever it seemed.

A terrible soulless wailing quickly made itself apparent, assaulting his eardrums with it's horrid volume, far too loud and powerful to come from any monster he could imagine, and it felt as if it were the walls themselves that moaned with this nearly-tangible horror. Then, it became a chorus of cries, the lamenting howls of the damned, and Frank wondered if he was to be the latest addition to this hellish choir, if he were doomed to be forever part of this horror.

Then he began to yell. He had become one of them, he knew it. This descent would be endless, and there would never be a way back. He had passed something, and as bad as things were up there, this was worse. Far worse. There was one particular voice in that horrific legion, one that sounded like the lament of a tormented person, one who had never experienced good will, one that had been abused and neglected beyond tolerance.

It spoke of horrific hallucinations, of waking from one nightmare only to find something a million times worse. It spoke of hatred, of the fear and loathing that they constantly felt, and slowly, Frank realized that there was a story being told by the hellish chorus, of a young, terrified girl who was despised for her unpleasantness, and feared for her powers.

She could kill people with her mind if she wanted to, and eventually, her father, the one person whom she trusted and loved, betrayed her. He willingly gave her to be tormented and abused, and she had no idea why. Even when she gave birth to her children, whom she had nurtured and cared for, her babies were taken away and never seen from again.

She spoke of the hatred and vengeance she vowed to wreak on the world for their torment, for their apathy, for them daring to live when she suffered. Then, finally, there was the black void, complete, utter silence. She was floating in darkness, left alone to die and rot. But although she was no longer alive, her spirit, her vengeance would live on.

Even if the expression had been worn out smoothly in the course of Frank's 'night', it truly did feel like he was falling through a dark, unreal void for an eternity, drifting endlessly to an unimaginably terrible place. His mind had been broken, practically destroyed by the insane and meaningless torments that he had undergone for the amusement of a wretched faceless being. However, his torturous ordeal was far from over, and the downward spiraling cycle of pain and death he was experiencing would accelerate.

His thoughts tuned out from the bleak tale of the tormented young girl, and concentrated on the few pockets of happiness scattered around. The thoughts were buzzing infuriatingly in front of him, even if he couldn't physically see it and Frank furiously snatched out and reached one.

"_**Frank."**_

"…_**Yeah?"**_

"_**Wake up, honey, you've been sleeping forever."**_

"_**I'm tired…"**_

"_**So you're going to just sleep your life away? Come on, up and at 'em Frank.**_

"_**What's the time?"**_

"_**Who cares what time it is, it's wasting away every second. Oh, sometimes you're just impossible Frank."**_

"…_**a few more minutes…"**_

"_**No sir, not a minute longer. Come on now"**_

"_**Yes, mom"**_

"_**Ah, Frank, your sense of humor's already ahead of you. I think I know what'll do the trick for you. I think it'll work just fine, we don't need anything silly like clothes to come between us."**_

"_**Ahhh…..yeah, you're right. That'll do the trick."**_

"_**You see? I'm never wrong"**_

"_**Never. You're always beautiful to me."**_

"I bet you tell that to every girl you see."

"_**No, only the one I'm married to."**_

"_**I love you, Frank."**_

"_**I love you too, Mary. I'll never leave you."**_

_He finally turned around, and set his eyes on his wife, pulling her closely towards him for a moment. Her beautifully mesmerizing grey eyes gazed deeply into his dark eyes. Her hair, a gorgeous, natural strawberry-blonde, shined even without having yet acquainted with shampoo for the day, and small golden strands framed her delicate, yet lovely face. Her small, perfect breasts lay softly against his chest, and his hands rested on the silky small of her back. _

_In that moment, just like he had done hundreds of times before, he realized just how much more fantastically, exquisitely, elegantly beautiful Mary Isabelle Montecalvo-Dombrowski was. He dwelled on just how amazingly lucky he was to have the best woman in the entire history of the universe, but that realization would be tempered with a heavy sense of loss. _

_It was the acme of his life, perhaps __**the **__defining moment of his life, the climax of the times where he had been happy. Mary would never look like the anorexic waifs in the supermodel industry, nor would she ever claim herself to be, but at this point, no Venus, no angel could even compare to the pure, sublime beauty of his woman he held in his arms at the moment. Nothing, he thought, could ever match this moment, he was certain that it was the most wonderful moment he had ever experienced in his life. These thoughts were all the more painful when he realized that it __**never **__would be matched, that it __**couldn't **__be matched._

"_**Frank, please promise you'll get over me if I…disappear?"**_

"..Why would you ever think of that?!"

_Her flawless porcelain skin suddenly turned an ashen gray, and her eyes bulged out freakishly. Flakes of skin began to rot off her face, exposing the raw meat inside, and what was once his wife had now decayed into a rotten corpse. Yet, the horror of it affected Frank deeply, for he really had seen his wife literally fall apart from the most unspeakable of diseases, the dreaded "Jigsaw death". It was an incurable disease, and it was unlike any virus, bacteria or indeed, anything Science could easily identify. _

_Quite literally, without any warning, people would slowly break apart into pieces, and their skin would putrefy quickly. It was absolutely terrifying to see his wife, the woman he loved the most, suffer a gruesome death, and the worst part was, he was unsure if he was responsible for it. _

Sometime during his brief dream, he had been purged from the void, and deposited in a different place. He opened his eyes, and recoiled in pain. It seemed as if the world was rapidly shifting back and forth between two different places, and for all he knew, it was. Suddenly, the shift stopped, and he presumed that he had somehow gone back into the Auburn district.

He could feel the rough, starchy feel of a mattress that had been left for decades, and he opened his eyes to find himself sitting on the mattress, which was lying in the middle of an old apartment room. How was it possible for him to have jumped into a hole on the street, fallen miles beneath the Earth, and yet find himself 'safely' inside an abandoned building? Was it the damned "Reality Shifts" again?

The room looked as if it had been abandoned half-way through construction, and strangely enough, it seemed as if it had been in that state for half a century. Old paint cans lay around, with a garish red mark worryingly smeared across an otherwise drab grey wall. There was a strong smell of decay and rust again, and it made Frank nauseous. There were a few windows, but they were boarded up with rotten wood, and it was only the valiant attempt of a pathetic old lamp hanging on the ceiling that allowed Frank to admire the ugliness of the scenery. There was a doorway to Frank's left, and he could imagine dozens of doors stretching down the endless corridor.

The room was almost devoid of furniture, save for an old table with a small, old-style radio on it. Oddly enough, there was also a dangerously large sledgehammer lying on one side, almost daring Frank to end another human life again with its intoxicating power. The Radio turned itself on with a jolt, and the sudden explosion of white noise nearly gave Frank a heart attack. For a moment, there were millions of incomprehensible noises, some sounding suspiciously monstrous, but soon it became apparent that he was somehow receiving a news report.

Frank walked up to the radio, and twisted the dial, desperate for an update. What he would hear would shock him. At first, a calm, almost robotic voice gave a news update, which was rather concerning to him.

"_The Terrorist ……. Auburn is intensifying, with an estimated death toll………………the insurgents. A few hours ago, a Black …..Helicopter was apparently ……. by another helicopter belonging to the mysterious assailants, and ……….. Since then, the police have pulled out of the district….. district and evacuating any residents still….."_

A desperate voice broke in, sounding as if he was out of breath and running constantly

"_Breaking News, people! This is Diego Rodriguez, reporting live from within the Auburn District!! ATC Patrol Cars have entered the district, and it appears that they're desperately trying to cover something up! However, it appears that the mysterious assailants are having their hands full; we've seen dozens of dozens of mutilated bodies lying around, and that gives us hope for the brave soldiers who had been shot down recently."_

"Sir, this is a restricted area. Back away right now."

"_But the Public has to know…"  
"To hell with the public, buddy! If you have any idea about what danger you're putting yourself in, you'd turn back and get the hell out of here right now!"_

"_Well, it appears that-HOLY SHIT!!!! We have to cut this short, it appears that the insurgents have found our position!"_

It was terribly noisy, but it sounded like a warzone. Explosions were all over the place, and deafening gunfire filled the air. Suddenly, the transmission stopped, and he heard several cold, inhumanly distorted voices talking over the radio waves.

"Command, Civilians have been neutralized"

"Roger, Zulu Squad, proceed to the Apartment Building. We must eliminate the operative at all costs."

Frank was beginning to feel rather numb to the madness of the situation, and for some reason, he wasn't petrified in fear or indeed, confused. He was living in the moment, and right now, he needed to evade the grasp of an army of trained killers. It was absurd, it was unbelievable, but he was too far gone to care anymore.

He grabbed the sledgehammer, and put his back to the doorway. The unholy commotion that the haunted radio had caused probably alerted the entire district of an intruder, and the best Frank could hope for was that they would forget about it. Judging by the sound of footsteps moving closer and closer, he was out of luck.

"Any sign of the operative?"

"Shut the fuck up!"

Frank snickered, and immediately regretted doing so. If the killers had heard him, they weren't indicating any reaction to it, and he held his breath. He wasn't prepared to kill again, but he would do whatever it takes to stay alive, and he desperately hoped that it wouldn't come to violence.

Apparently, an entire platoon of black-ops soldiers had entered the facility, for he could hear a motherlode of footsteps desperately searching for the cause of the noise. He could hear the sound of at least twenty combat boots hitting the floor, and they were moving _fast. _He began to breathe shallowly, and his heart beat unnaturally.

"Check the doors!!"  
He heard the sound of a door being kicked open, and judging by the distance, it was at least ten rooms down. It was certainly a massive building, and there was the slightest glimmer of hope that he would be overlooked, that he would not have to fight.

_Slam! Slam! Slam!_

They were getting closer at an alarming rate, and he could imagine them spreading out like a biblical swarm of locusts. He could visualize their horrifying visages, insane monsters twitching their heads and looking terrifying.

_Oh god, what am I going to do? _**(Sorry if this is a bit of a cliffhanger, and if it's a big change in mood, but basically I want my protagonist to briefly experience the chaos of the F.E.A.R. incident, and I'm rather exhausted right now. Any ideas or suggestions would be great.)**


	10. Premonition

Frank's mind had gone through horrible, ghastly, shockingly abominable ordeals, having been twisted, tormented, persecuted, agonized among thousands of other inssufficient words to describe the sheer distress the man was undergoing. The horrible force responsible for his torment, out of no fathomable reason, dumped Frank into an abandoned, aged version of his home, trapping him alone with a group of cold, inhuman killers.

"Take up defensive positions. The Commander wants us to use this building as a trap for the operative. Keep quiet."

With a jolt of horror, Frank realized why he was able to hear every transmission that the hunters were sending. The infernal, hellish radio, choked with static and incoherent noise, was playing out the distorted voices of the murderers with rather disturbing aural clarity. That was why they seemed to gain on Frank's room, and the civilian felt truly helpless. The Sledgehammer he was gripping fearfully would only stun one of the soldiers at best, leaving Frank to be shredded and and mulched up by a hail of cold bullets. He needed to do something else.

He stuck his foot out, and the floorboards creaked painfully loud. There was no mistaking it, the killers definitely heard it, and they began to _sprint_ towards Frank's trap. There was unmistakable sadistic glee in their demonic voices, as the radio crackled with infuriating exuberance.

_The floor. I need to hide._

Without a second thought, Frank ripped off a rotten plank, surprised to find that he actually pulled off a sizable hole into a secret spot. It may have been a primitive version of a trap door, and it may have been a gateway into another terrible portal, but it seemed like the only place for him to go. He leaped into the darkness below, smashing his jaw painfully against the floor. The space beneath the floor was rather cramped, yet it was surprisingly roomy enough for Frank to slowly crawl through. He covered the hole with the plank, hoping that the commotion had concealed his escape, and prayed.

"Come on, fucker-where did you go??"

He was encapsulated in darkness, yet he could see dark shapes moving about through miniscule gaps beneath him. The floor creaked with ancient decay all around him, and he felt the unpleasant sensation of spiders crawling around him. He had to cover his mouth in order to cover his whimpers.

The light in his room shone above him, yet Frank could see other lights flashing down in other spots from the crawlspace. There were dozens of black shapes littering the floor, causing his vision to be sadly limited. It seemed that the crawlspace allowed free access

"There's nothing here, sir, False Alarm"

"Roger that, take defensive positions and wait for my signal. Operative inbound in approximately one minute"

This mysterious operative raised some bizarre questions for Frank. He thought back to the brief news report that the demonic force controlling Frank's fate delighted in giving him. The terrorists who were now roaming around inches above the terrified civilian had apparently shot down a helicopter containing rescue-workers and special forces operatives. In addition, there was a Police blockade of the district, with the civilians having been evacuated.

_Makes sense, I can remember Mark's team having a blockade at the entrance to the district. But that 'Live' Report claimed that the Helicopter crew was still alive, slaughtering dozens of the terrorists. This doesn't sound good...._

He crawled on, breathing in stale, motionless air that hadn't seen the sky for decades, and felt cobwebs collect around his face. He blinked constantly, salty tears falling down from the sheer pain, and it was an extremely taxing effort to keep himself from screaming. He moved down, finally settling down beneath a room that seemed to be empty.

It seemed as if his arduous journey had taken forever, yet in another timescale, it had merely taken a gruelling minute. He knew this because the annihilation of the terrorists began at the hands of the notorious 'Operative.'

It began with a bang. He heard a sickening crack, sounding as if bones were being twisted and broken with ease, and the sound of a body hitting the floor with a loud flop. Then, everything went to hell. He heard the crack of an explosion in another room, instantly maiming everyone inside the room closest to Frank, and droplets of crimson fluid flowed down into the crawlspace beside Frank. He closed his eyes, and listened to the catastrophes.

**CONTACT!!"**

"WHAT THE FUCK DO I-AAAAAAGGGHHHH!!!!!"

"HE'S TOO FAST!!!!!"

"WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT??!!"

"SHUT THE-NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!"

"TAKE COVER!!"

"WHICH WAY??!! Aughugghhhhh!!!!

"NEED REINFORCEMENTS!!"

"HE WIPED OUT THE WHOLE-UNNNGGGHHH!!!!"

The battle raged on with unparalleled wrath, compressing the hateful devatation and massacres of human warfare into a small, cramped Apartment Building in an abandoned industrial district in the United States of America. Explosions rocked the floor, shaking Frank down and smacking him down. With a terribly loud crash, the floorboards above Frank gave in and he had the sensation of being entombed. He was dying....

When he woke up, it was silent. The stench of death hung in the air, and the walls of the apartment building were destroyed, covered with gory evidence of the brutal battle that had happened moments ago. The chaotic violence he had been an unwilling witness to was just as horrific as the torments that the poor writer had suffered. The sheer, unnatural, monstrous annihilation of the assailants by the nameless "Operative" made Frank feel even lonelier and more vulnerable, seeing as there were threats far more bloodthirsty and inscrutable than mere monsters. This sort of cruelty was difference, a cold, clinical, human-yet-inhumane detached form of killing. There was no pleasure or satisfaction derived from the ignoble slaughter of the terrorists, no sense of duty or justice. It seemed as if they were killed for the sake of killing.

The lights in the building were mostly destroyed, yet there was the warmth and crackling of fire spread throughout the wreckage of the residential building. The fires gave a ghoulish, terrifying visage of the maimed bodies, the remains of the massacre created by the mysterious operative. It is absolutely, completely impossible to describe the tiniest amount of pure, detached evil that had gone into every droplet of blood spilled by the intruders, and the massacre, the sheer crushing extermination of the soldiers, made Franks mind go blank with shock. The scene was terrible, absolutely awful, the sheer amount of pain and death spread all around him was mind-breaking.

Rivers of blood covered the walls and ceiling entirely, and mangled limbs and mushed up innards carpeted the floor. A very insufficient way to describe the pure destruction of the scene was to imagine a small village of people being fed through a grinder, mulched up through a giant blender, and the bloodied remains used to redecorate the Apartment Building Frank was in. No, that was a pathetic example, the most depraved thoughts Frank could possibly conceive of the evil power's doing simply did not compare to the sheer impetuosity of the ruins he had seen here.

He walked out. There was no danger from the terrorists, any more. The memory of the Tall Man flashed briefly through Frank's mind, yet the violence seemed too much even to be the eldritch horror's handiwork. The tormented, dangerous girl whose menacing presence hung in the air was forgotten. The only thing he feared now was the "operative."

_Nothing to be afraid of, but FEAR Itself. Well, FEAR has found a way to make itself real. The Grim Reaper had come to take the lives of those killers, yet he did not save me. He merely did not see me._

August 24th 2045

Frank "Rowdy" Betters

Ah hell, I think we've stumbled on a real badass now. I don't know where he came from, he just showed up one morning holding a letter from some 'good samaritan' about him being transferred to my unit. I have no idea why, this guy is way too over-qualified and competent to work with Ice-queen Jin and meat-head Spen.

His reflexes are completely off the charts, I've never seen anything so goddamn fast as this bastard before. He literally ran 5 circles around me, caught a fly like a Kung Fu master, took out my pen and held it a millionth of an inch in front of my goddamn eyes, and did all this in the time it took for me to blink.

His aim's fucking amazing too, he managed to empty out our entire Pistol stock in half a minute, and every fucking shot was right between the eyes. Really, I'm disturbed as to what the hell those jokers think they are about him, he's too goddamn unreal.

Spen didn't like him much though. He came up to me an hour ago and said that there was something off about him. For one thing, he's way too average looking. Six feet tall, dark-brown hair, average build, nothing interesting. Except for his eyes. There's something odd about him, something that doesn't ring true. It's like he's looking right through you, and it really creeps me out.

I have the feeling something big's going to happen real soon. I replaced Spen with the transfer as the new Point Man, as I'm desperate for SOMEONE to make our unit look worthwhile. After all, if the existence of your unit had been created by a superstitious, incompetent military colonel, it's hard to be taken seriously...

The ancient, rusted walls of the apartment building were a little quagmire to Frank, as he was sure that he had been here before, the whole place reeked of a terrible case of déjà vu. It definitely looked like Frank's home, two boring, bleak decades into the future. Blood trails led everywhere, pointing to dark holes in the wall, to shadowy corners of the ruined corridors, and to piles of dismembered, sliced up limbs. Frank numbly went on, noticing that the doorway at the end of the dark corridor was bathed in an unnaturally orange light.

As he reached the doorway, the sensation of his head being split open with a rusty chainsaw poured into his head, forcing him to lean against the wall and bear the pain. As his mind cleared, he saw that he was in the middle of chaos. There was a colossal inferno to the right side of the entrance, blocking off any bad foolish thoughts of escape in that direction. Dozens of people, dead people, littered the streets like broken pieces of trash, their faces and bodies mutilated beyond recognition. All of them were ordinary people with loving families, just like Frank.

The air was covered with thick, choking ash, and it made Frank's lungs feel as if they were being buried alive. The skies were a bleak, dark grayish brown, and immeasurably massive clouds swirled menacingly across the sky, giving an unnatural, bleak, apocalyptic light to the massacre that Frank was experiencing. Flashes of 'colors', brighter than white, struck across the sky, making it painful to even gaze up. So Frank looked down.

For hours, it seemed, he was walking through a hellish scene of death and destruction, following an endless trail of bodies in every ghoulish position of death. The Operative, Mark Saunders, Escaping the District, the Reality Shifts, The goddamn Tall Man himself, all of them swirled through his mind, poking out into his vision and taunting him with their appearance, their apparitions taunting his insanity. This rather indifferent, cold attitude, combined with the fact that he could only see an inch ahead of him, was an excuse for why Frank bumped into a young man.

He was a tall, pale man, with a deathly white face and a grin that appeared to be wider than his face. His dazzlingly bizarre eyes were hollowed out and shadowed, and a gaping, bloody bullet hole lay straight in the middle of his forehead. Despite the way he carried himself, the young man's narrowed, pointed face showed that he had aged prematurely. Most disturbingly, there was dried, sticky liquid, HUMAN blood, splattered all over the man's mouth, and he grinned at Frank exposing his well-filed, reddish teeth. Frank had come face-to-face with a goddamn cannibal.

The Cannibal wore a rather expensive looking military jacket, and to Frank, he looked as if he were a rogue soldier. A shadowy figure beside the Cannibal came into view, and Frank gaped in pure shock. It was extremely hazy and terrible to see through all the smoke and dust, and there seemed to be pools of distortion striking across the sky, wreaking hell on Frank's eyes. Suddenly, there was a flash, and Frank realized that suddenly, his vision was clearer than ever, that countless centillions of different shades, hues, and colors rushed into his vision.

The shadowy figure appeared to be some sort of secret military operative, dressed in some rather high-tech looking armor, and any skin was completely covered by his suit. A black balaclava, and some evil-red glasses, concealed any sign of identification for the man. The soldier hovered silently behind the cannibal, his head ducked in some sort of unholy prayer, and the Cannibal licked his lips calmly.

"Ah, I see there's an audience for our new performance. Do you understand, lowlife, why your pathetic little abode had to be destroyed? My mother was tortured, she was abused by a cruel, indifferent world, and you know what? I was a victim as well. I never had the loving caress of a mother, only the cold, harsh metal of a scientific instrument. I never had the family, only the thoughts of hundreds of mindless strangers. You, on the other hand, have had everything you could ever have wanted, you pathetic freak, you never lifted a finger to help her!!"

Frank was furious. He was tired of everything. He was tired of being a plaything for an unfathomably cruel monster. He was tired of being kept in the dark. He was tired of having been forced away from his family and thrown into his dump by an uncaring government. He was tired of experiencing hate and death. And yet, despite all this suffering, all this pain, Frank hadn't gone the path of the cannibal before him

but now, he knew. Frank Elwood knew who the cannibalistic freak in front of him was. Frank knew what had caused the thousands of dead men, women and innocent children in this hallucination. This was a test of forgiveness, wasn't it? Well, Frank had no sympathy. And that was why he dived onto the cannibal, and smashed his face into the floor.

He was consumed by hate and fury, and he was blindly relishing the pain, the suffering he was causing. For every little second of terrible suffering, of indescribable torture, Frank paid it back infinitely, roaring and ripping into the body with an uncontrollable rage. The man's terrible screams and cries for mercy became a pleasant background song, and before long, it was over. The body of the man was mutilated beyond recognition, the head destroyed.

"Frankie?"

Frank got up, and stared down the little girl that was standing behind him. She was a cruel, evil looking child, who definitely was hiding something, but Frank was way beyond the point of caring about anything anymore. With an insane cry, he picked up the knife that the Cannibal was holding, and madly slashed the air, not knowing or caring that the girl had dissolved into a harmless pile of ashes.

_Yes? What is it? Just a few more minutes, mum, I haven't even packed yet._

He was standing in a beautiful green meadow, surrounded by hundreds of pale stone slabs. There was a stone in front of him, the words unreadable and garbled, yet Frank knew that it was the grave of the most important people in his world. He hung his head in a moment of silence, and blankly, realized that he was alone. Mother was dead.

He opened his eyes tearfully, and realized that he was back again, in his room, pondering what the hell to do. He opened the drawers tearfully, searching desperately, and found the old 1923 Magnum .6000, a gift from his gun-loving, racist uncle whom Frank had despised. There was only one bullet in the chamber, but it was enough.

_Time to decide._

He gave the barrel of the gun a good flip, and then placed it to his temple, trembling terribly. And then, he pulled the trigger, hoping to release himself.

Nothing. There was nothing. Frank grinned, and then threw away the worthless piece of crap, knowing that it was proof of his doom. He couldn't kill himself, but he wasn't going to let himself be destroyed in such a way. No. He would grin and bear it, bear it until even the devil himself would scream, and he'd give the finger to pain itself.


	11. The End is Far Too Soon

_**F.E.A.R. Data Log**_: _**PROJECT AUBURN**_

_**Observation Period**_: _**August 24th 2019 to August 24th 2024**_  
_**Goal: To observe the long-term effects of Project Origin on the civilian population of the Auburn District. It has already been confirmed that the district has been contaminated by a general feeling of nausea, fear and aggression, yet over the past few decades, this 'aura' has amplified over the past few years.**_

It appears that the raid on Fairview Heights, a known hideout of a group of dangerous cultists, has unleashed paranormal activity across the district, forcing F.E.A.R. agents to shut it down.

However, many new civilians have been forcibly transferred to the abandoned district due to the shiftless politics of the city, allowing F.E.A.R. agents a rare opportunity to observe new arrivals to this 'phenomenon.'

A 5 year probationary period will be warranted on each new arrival, and F.E.A.R. agents are encouraged to add new 'stimulus' such as using the hallucinogen Abel to affect the subjects' psyche.

F.E.A.R. agents are expected to report all new data to Command each day, for information on the true nature of the otherworld is imperative.

Subject: Frank Elwood

Date of Birth: September 13th 1977

Height: 197 cm

Weight: 85 Kg

Hair Color: Dark Brown

Eye: Hazel

Distinguishing features: Dark skin for a Caucasian, and an old healed scar over his left eyebrow.

Education: International School of Fairport (1980-1982), Wade Elementary (1982-1987), Wade Higher Education (1987-1995), Midwestern University of Fairport (1995-1999)

Biography: An extremely introverted loner, Frank Elwood had few friends and connections, and he had a very powerful affection for his parents. Although he was a decent student, he had a passion for writing, and often planned on making a career out of horror stories, idolizing authors such as H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King.

Once graduated, he married a Mary Isabelle Montecalvo-Dombrowski, and together they planned on a family. However, during an outbreak of "The Jigsaw Death" (now believed by F.E.A.R. scientists to be a result of the otherworld crossing over to reality), his wife was affected and died a terrible, horrific death. The author immediately plunged into a deep depression, and although he managed to publish a few pulp-novels, his writing suffered and he soon went into heavy debt.

Frank Elwood's dark mood deepened even further as his beloved father died of a heart attack, and his infirm mother was relocated to a "retirement home", leaving him completely alone. As a result of his lack of money, Frank was immediately relocated to the Auburn District, giving F.E.A.R. Operatives a prime chance to observe new arrivals to the phenomenon of the district.

He was moved to Fairview Heights, the infamous apartment building, home to several strange paranormal artifacts.

Be warned, however; Frank has a history of being rather 'disturbed' and he is very paranoid. If he ever learns that there is someone out there, watching him, abort the project immediately, and terminate him.

STATUS: TERMINATED (Agent Saunders assigned to execute Elwood.

Manifestations of his fears and darker thoughts have been appearing throughout the district, presumably created by the paranormal artifacts in Fairview Heights.

His psyche is degenerating phenomenally fast, and it will not be long before he will take out his frustrations on nearby targets.)

LAST EDITED BY: Daniel Henderson

Frank sat on his bed again, idly lifting up his gun and playing with the barrel. His mind had clearly degenerated, he was sure of that; the last few hours (hours? He wasn't sure) of his life had been nothing but endless, pointless insanity and pain. He wondered idly, if it was really a cruel joke being played on him by a supernatural force, or if it was all just a bad, terrible hallucination created by his terribly deprived imagination. Good inspiration for his novel, if he had the time to write on it again.

Of course, it seemed that things were coming full-circle again. He was back in his room, deciding what the hell to do. Well, for all he knew, things weren't going to get much better, and a plan wouldn't really help. So that was why he gained the courage to get off his bed, walk over to his old, terribly creaky door, and then slowly opened it. He didn't even take one last look at the pitiful abode that he had lived in for the last five years. It was pointless.

He strolled loudly down the corridor, his head pounding painfully, and his heart feeling as if it would tear his chest apart. He ignored it; he had suffered things far worse than this. He still had absolutely no idea what was going on, but he didn't care.  
"Where the hell do you think you're going, Frank? You're not doing it right!"  
He ignored the terribly familiar dulcet tones of his beautiful wife as she literally popped out of thin air inches away from his nose, the mere sight of her making him grit his teeth and frown slightly. This was not his wife. It was just another twisted trick created by the bastard toying with his mind, another ruined memory. He simply walked through her.

"Frankie, come back, don't you want to be with us?"

'Mary' had appeared once more to his side, this time turned into a matronly, wispy grey-haired, tiny little woman. It was his mother. He stared fiercely at the manifestation, his eyes cutting ice-cold daggers into the soulless creation. Before his eyes, he saw the pitiful hallucination collapse and crumble away, leaving behind a miniscule pile of ashes.

He stepped on it.

The most bloodcurdlingly terrifying scream he had ever experienced erupted from the pile, and he literally collapsed, his head feeling as if it had been used as a nuclear testing ground. He truly did feel as if he was in agony. Slowly, painfully, he got back up, each little movement feeling as if a train crashed into his limbs, and he barely even noticed that the hallway had changed.

It was hellishly red again, and covered with rust, dust, and some rather dark, obvious red liquid that Frank had become desensitized to. After all, he had spilled plenty of it in his ordeal. He walked on, no longer afraid or paralyzed in fear. Oh, yes, he was absolutely, completely in shock, his mind numb with fear, yet he was brave enough to just ignore it and go along. It would not end well.

_**What are you?**_

The childish, extremely clear voice of a young girl cut into his mind, making it seem as if it had just been one of his own thoughts. Yet, he knew who he was. Frank Elwood, a middle-aged writer who's found himself in the crappiest place in the world, and he no longer cares what the world decides to throw at him.

After what felt like endless hours of moving through the same dark red corridors without any end, Frank finally found something interesting. It was Mark Saunders, or more accurately, the head of Mark Saunders. It had been left on the floor in the center of a massive pile of blood. Strangely enough, Frank wasn't afraid at the loss of the closest person he could have called a "friend" in this catastrophe

He laughed. A lot.

"Frank….if you can hear me….do the easiest job in the world…..die……"

He laughed insanely at the desperate, tormented sounds of his lost friend, knowing that he was probably undergoing a new, specifically-tailored experience of nightmarish horror for eternity. It wasn't malice that drove Frank, however. It was just another way to cope with his hopelessness.

Yet….perhaps….death can be a better choice….

He sat down, and then, realized that thousands of shadowy figures had closed in on him. Their faces were blank slates, yet Frank knew what they represented. They were the people, the men and women whom he had ignored and feared throughout his life, the people who had always made him feel uncomfortable throughout his existence. What a fitting end.

He fingered the Magnum softly, and then, with a smile, turned the weapon on his forehead. His best hope was that he would be dead forever. If he wasn't, if he was forever doomed to suffer a horrific experience for the rest of time, death would be nothing, and besides, it wouldn't hurt.

He pulled the trigger.

The night had always made Frank unhappy and nervous about himself. For years, he had hoped to get out of the hell-hole that had been his home for much longer than he desired. Of course, there was the small problem with the fact that there was something wrong with the district, something terribly wrong that had made his suffering even worse.

Frank couldn't cope with it anymore. One day, that force took over, and it destroyed him. Completely. On August 24th 2024, Frank Elwood attempted suicide, and was immediately rushed into the custody of the Fairport government.

Within a month, he was gone.

Oh well.

**(Damnit. That's the end of my story. I'm so sorry for it not making any sense, but I hope you readers liked it. Any comments are welcome!)**


	12. Epilogue

_**..........**_

The impossibly smooth, garishly colored walls of the beast's innards trembled, rippling with anticipation for its new meal. After endless millennia, after countless eons of pointless waiting, it was finally time for the Pain Elemental to rise up against its foes, to crush its strongest haters and to finally reign supreme over the realm of Magick. Yes, it was time.

But first, to deal with an unnecessary nuisance.

The Tall Man stalked over emotionlessly to the oozing blob of gore that had once been a human being. After its assignment to torment and stalk the old man, it was now at a loss, waiting for orders it would never receive. The creature had been a fool, an arrogant fool, to believe that it could even attempt to strike down the power of Pain, to even conceive of it. Of course, an eternity of unspeakable tortures had broken the creature to the Elemental's will, to be nothing more than a mindless puppet.

It was time for the Elemental to cut the strings.

The puddle of goo shimmered, and in an unspeakable parody of the laws of nature, seemed to expand exponentially, its glutinous, horrific mass looming over the unexpressive figure of the Tall Man. The Tall Man, for the first time in a centilliovigintilnosillion years, felt an emotion.

The Tall Man felt fear. He could feel the tendrils, the very organs of the Elemental vibrating in delight, gleeful for his doom. He suddenly fell over, and desperately tried to grab hold of the creature's flesh. Looking down, he saw a void. Blackness. Emptiness. Nothing. There was nothing beneath him, he would fall into eternity. He desperately stared up at the emotionless figure of the blob, noting that it was suddenly morphing, shifting into a horrific parody of a ghoulish creature. It was pitiful. The Tall Man, for the last time in his horrific existence, had a thought. As horrific as his torment was, he didn't want to die.

_It wanted the human, not me. It was using me all along._

The twisted, broken figure of the new prince coldly stared at the desperate body of his former tormentor, smiling sadistically at it. A tiny part of him was struggling, still horrified, still fearful, still lamenting its existence. No matter. His master wanted to preserve a part of the human's soul for torment, and Frank was fine with that. No, he wasn't Frank anymore. That old part of him, the weak part of him, was gone.

He was the Prince now. The loyal, unswerving prince of Pain, and it was time for the old puppet to leave. Effortlessly, he tore off the hand of the desperate creature that was hanging on for another chance at redemption, and it disappeared, lost to the endless seas of chaos and despair, beyond any hope of retrieval. It didn't matter.

Deeply inside, the final, twisted remnants of what had once been Frank, writhed in agony inside, doomed to an eternity of horrific suffering. He had no mouth, and he had to scream.

_And after long last, the Arrogant Man knew the name of The King. And with the true Prince, the pitiful transfigured human from the Realm of Science, Our great lord dominated his rightful realm, submitting all to his majestic wisdom. Rejoice, our children, for he will never reach us again…. _

– _The book of the King, Chapter 12_

**December 1****st**** 2026.**

**I cannot ever truly describe the amazing, frightening experiences that have happened to me, but I am grateful to say that this will not be my final entry, my dear diary. It seems that the infinite seas of chance, of sheer improbability, of saved me from an eternity of floating in the void. Instead, it dumped me in this place. **

**It appeared that the house that I had entrapped myself in a bout of madness was in reality, a portal to another world, and it was from this place, that I found a respite from the insanity of my life. There, I met my father.**

**He was an old, kindly man, his face wrinkled and lined, yet he was also fiercely energetic, bursting with energy. He looked so much like me, it was heartbreaking. He told me the most frightening things, and oh, my diary, they were terrifying.**

**My creation, the Pain Elemental, the madness of the cult, my 'mother'; they were all fabrications of a man's mind. You see, in the strangeness of the Omniverse, it appears that every action has a cause. This man, this 'God', was nothing of the sort. He was an ordinary writer, and a failure at that. He had created the saga of the 'Cult', had unintentionally given us life, and then left it hanging. He had been consumed by the Realm of Magick, and my father (no, Malcolm) told me that the Pain Elemental was very much real. It seems that the innocent man, in accidentally imagining the existence of such a horrific creature, was chosen as the perfect sacrifice for it.**

**As for this place, Malcolm told me not to worry about it. It looked like what I imagined paradise to be like…only a little better. He told me that he and his mother had been searching for proof of this place, and now, thanks to the efforts of the cult (he was rather vague of that), and we had found it. It might be the 'afterlife', but Malcolm told me that it was an ignorant concept.**

**Whatever it is, I'll be glad to stay in it. I've finally found peace, and I intend to keep it…**


End file.
